Stop 1 of 5
The minor pentatonic: box one
Five notes that sound good together and their most famous shape.
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Stop 1 of 5
Five notes that sound good together and their most famous shape.
Until now the guitar has been your engine: chords, strumming, riffs and the 12-bar blues. In these hills it starts to sing. The tool for that is a five-note shape that generations of blues, rock, soul and metal guitarists have relied on: the . By the end of this stop you'll have its most famous shape under your fingers and you'll know how to make music with just two of its notes.
Before any explanation, listen. First the five notes of the scale, from low to high, ending on the same note you started on, only higher:
Now listen to four of those notes turned into a phrase. It's very short, but it already sounds like a blues solo:
That sound probably feels familiar even if you can't say where from. That's no accident: the minor pentatonic is in the DNA of the blues and, through it, of rock, soul, funk and heavy metal. Players as different as B.B. King, Jimmy Page, Mark Knopfler and Slash built much of their soloing on these five notes.
For now a practical definition is enough: a scale is a palette of notes that sound good together in a given context. A painter doesn't use every colour in every picture; they choose a palette and paint with it. When you solo over a blues in A, the A minor pentatonic is your palette: any note you pick from it will fit the accompaniment.
A has five different notes ("penta" is Greek for five). The A minor pentatonic has these:
A, C, D, E and G. Then it starts again: the next note is A once more, an octave higher. The first note, the one that names the scale, is the root: the point of rest, "home". Notice how the last note of the phrase above sounded like an ending: it was the root.
If you measure the distance between neighbouring notes in the diagram above, you'll see that none of them is just one fret from another: the jumps are two or three frets. Notes one fret apart (a semitone) are the ones that "rub" the most when they sound close together or over a chord, and the pentatonic has none. That's why it's so forgiving to start with.
Later, in The Valley of Sound, you'll meet the seven-note major scale and see where these five notes come from. If you're already curious, the minor pentatonic formula relative to its root is 1 ♭3 4 5 ♭7. The ♭3 (C in A) is what gives it its "minor" colour, a dark, melancholy flavour that suits the blues so well.
On the guitar, every note of the scale appears in many places on the neck. To avoid getting lost, guitarists learn scales in zones of about four frets where the hand doesn't need to move. Each zone is called a . The most used of all, box 1, starts on the root on the sixth string: for A minor, at the 5th fret.
String 6, Fret 5: A2 · 1 · Root
Look at the shape: two notes per string, at frets 5 and 7 or 5 and 8. On strings 6, 2 and 1 the second note is at fret 8; on strings 5, 4 and 3, at fret 7. Many players remember it as two three-string "steps".
Place your hand so your index (1) sits over fret 5, your middle (2) over fret 6, your ring (3) over fret 7 and your pinky (4) over fret 8. So:
String 6, Fret 5: A2 · 1 · Scale tone
Finger 2 doesn't play any note, but don't tuck it away: let it hover over fret 6, ready. Keeping the hand "open" in its place is what makes a box a box.
Inside box 1 there are three As: on the sixth string (fret 5), on the fourth string (fret 7) and on the first string (fret 5). They are your "homes": resting notes where a phrase can end and sound complete.
String 6, Fret 5: A2 · 1 · Root
Listen to them: it's the same note at three different heights. Each one vibrates twice as fast as the one before, yet we hear them as "the same" note.
Now play the whole box, from the lowest note to the highest and back, in (two notes per beat). Use the pick with a down-up motion; the next stop covers this technique in depth, but you can start alternating already.
Follow these rules from day one:
Once the shape holds by itself, it pays to travel through it in ways that make your fingers think. The first pattern is simple: play the two notes on each string twice before moving on. Each string becomes a little cell that repeats.
Now the most important part of this stop. Choose two neighbouring notes on one string and, without using any other, try to make them sound like music by playing with rhythm and silence. Listen to this example with C and D on the third string, which finally lands on the root on the fourth:
Two notes and a good rhythm already make a phrase. Many memorable solos use very few notes: what makes them memorable is rhythm, repetition and silence. You'll develop that idea in Your first improvisation.
One note per string
Play a single note on each string (for example, the one at fret 5) and jump between strings. It trains your picking hand and shows you how the scale sounds with wide leaps.
Two notes per string
Stay on one string and combine its two notes with different rhythms. It's the basis of first solos: little material, lots of intention.
Start at 60 BPM with the tab from the "Up and down the box" scene. When it comes out clean three times in a row, go up 5 BPM. If you miss twice, go down 5. Watch your fretting hand at first and, once you feel secure, play with your eyes closed.
Goal: Play the whole box up and down four times in a row at 80 BPM, in eighth notes, without stopping or hitting notes outside the scale.
Start the backing. Pick two neighbouring notes on one string (for example, C and D on the third, or G and A on the fourth) and play short phrases of one or two bars. Always leave a bar of silence between phrases. End some of them on the nearest root.
When you feel comfortable, switch to a different pair of notes on each time round the blues.
Goal: Play a whole blues (12 bars) making phrases with just two notes and ending each phrase on a root.
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