Pentatonic scales
Five notes with no half steps, the guitar's go-to scale for improvising, in its major and minor forms.
Essential
Content under musical review. It may contain inaccuracies.
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Five notes with no half steps, the guitar's go-to scale for improvising, in its major and minor forms.
Essential
A pentatonic scale has five notes. The two most common, major and minor, come from removing the two notes that form half steps from the major scale (or the natural minor). With no half steps, almost no note clashes with the chords of the key, which is why so many guitarists learn it first for improvising.
The A minor pentatonic:
The C major pentatonic, which has exactly the same notes but starts somewhere else:
The first sounds darker and bluesy; the second, open and country-like.
| Scale | Formula | In practice |
|---|---|---|
| Major pentatonic | 1 2 3 5 6 | Major scale without 4 and 7 |
| Minor pentatonic | 1 b3 4 5 b7 | Natural minor without 2 and b6 |
A minor pentatonic on the fretboard. The best-known "box" sits between frets 5 and 8, two notes per string:
String 6, Open: E2 · 5 · Fifth
Play the first box (frets 5 and 8 on strings 6, 2 and 1; frets 5 and 7 on strings 5, 4 and 3). Then switch the labels to notes and find every A: those are your resting points.
The five boxes Scales, arpeggios & fretboardPentatonic positionsTravel the five pentatonic positions and connect them.A handy trick: A major pentatonic is F♯ minor pentatonic. If you know the minor box, slide it down three frets and you get the major one on the same tonic.
Add the flat fifth (b5) to the minor pentatonic and you get the blues scale: A C D E♭ E G. That note is a passing tone, rarely a resting point: it sounds tense and resolves a half step up or down.
Blues scaleWith no half steps, a pentatonic can be placed on other chord degrees for different colours. Levine describes this in jazz: over Dm7, the D, A and E minor pentatonics all fit inside D dorian and each stresses a different colour: D's is closest to the chord; A's adds the ninth (E); E's adds the ninth and the thirteenth (B). Over an altered dominant you can use pentatonics taken from the altered scale.
The pentatonic is also an anhemitonic (half-step-free) scale found in many musical traditions, not just the blues.