The Blues Scale (Minor Pentatonic) and the Major Pentatonic Scales on the Guitar

okay so in this lesson we're going to learn two scales the minor pentatonic scale and the major pentatonic scale and with these two scales you can play just about anything you need to play on the guitar in fact I'll be honest with you those are the only two scales that I know how to play and I've been playing guitar for years and can play a country and rock and blues and everything I do is made up of those two scales this is the only two that I ever really learned because I was able to do everything I wanted to with those two scales so we're going to start with a minor pentatonic scale which is in the key we're going to be in the key of E by the way and the minor pentatonic scale for in the key of E we're going to go up to the twelfth fret because that's an e there and that'll be the beginning or the root position of this scale and you'll see what I mean by root position as we go over it most of the notes in this scale you're going to see are going to land on this twelfth fret here so this is kind of the root position for the key of e for the e minor pentatonic scale also known as the blues scale by the way some people refer to that minor pentatonic scale as the blues scale same thing okay so let me show you how to play this this pattern of the minor pentatonic scale by the way scales are made up of different patterns so you'll have you'll be able to play that scale you know that if we're in the key of E for example you'll be able to play it here then you'll be able to play some of it down here and then down here and then down here and all different positions on the neck they're all the same notes you're just play them in different positions on the neck but this pattern that about to show you is the main pattern the one that you'll hear most solos come from and so I think that's probably the best place to start so here we go so we're going to start on the 15th fret then down to the twelfth fifteen twelve fourteen twelve fourteen twelve fourteen twelve fifteen twelve I just you could see I just changed strings after every two notes one two three four five six six strings okay and with those notes in that position you can play all kinds of really cool solos as you know blues solos in the key of E so for example you know you got a rhythm going that was all done using that scale now there's obviously some bins and some vibrato but the notes that I'm playing are all in that a minor pentatonic scale so that's that's now obviously I'm not going to explain note for note what I just did there but the point of this lesson is to show you that you now know the boundaries of how to play the blues in this position in the in the e position for the E minor pentatonic scale now here's what's really cool and what I remember when I first learned this it kind of blew my mind is to how this even works but it does so that's the blues for the key of E now if we want to play the E major pentatonic scale we can do the exact same pattern remember where you go fifteen twelve you know our 15th fret 12th fret 15th fret twelfth fret fourteen twelve fourteen twelve fourteen twelve fifteen twelve so remember that little shape there I think of that whole box that I just did as a shape or a pattern well if we slide everything down three frets one two three we're going to play those exact same that exact same box so this time it's going to be twelve nine twelve 911 911 911 9 12 9 I hope that makes sense what I just did there I just shifted everything down three frets and what that is is that's the major pentatonic scale that same pattern move down three frets will now allow you to play a major or a happy sound so the Blues is kind of kind of sad but this much happier it's the exact same pattern just shifted down so I thought that was pretty cool when I first discovered that so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to play along with the I've got kind of a jam track here that's not really blues or my I guess you could consider it kind of like almost a southern rock sounding thing but and I'm going to show you the difference how you can take this same chord progression it's just going to be e D and a those are the chords in this and you can play blues the the minor pentatonic scale and the major pentatonic scale over those same chords and you can get completely different sounds so let me show you what I'm talking about here okay turn it up a little bit I apologize for the audio quality on this but what to make do okay so now the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the blues see that's on that scale okay now I'm going to shift everything down three frets and listen to the difference in sound the difference so you can have all kinds of fun just going between those two scales and then what you do the better you get you start to mix the two scales and there's certain points where you're going to be in the major pentatonic scale certain points where you're going to be in the minor pentatonic scale and certain points where you're going to blend the two here's an example of kind of blending them kind of in the blue scale kind of in the major scale so see what I'm talking about so that is how you get you know you go back and forth between a blue scale minor pentatonic scale and a major pentatonic scale and the key of E and really that's that's all there is to that now let me a good practice for this by the way would be playing the scale I'm going to include with this lesson if you go to active melody calm you can download the jam track I just played there and so you can practice along with this but let me show you a really good little practice technique that will help you in learning these scales play along with it here so we're going to start with a minor pentatonic let me let it play through one time here okay here we go we're gonna go so that's just repeating that over and over again playing the minor pentatonic scale just practicing getting those notes now you can do the same thing I'm going to shift it down and do the major so that's a really good practice and then do you can kind of switch you know back and forth between the two all kinds of things you can do with that

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 4,832,527

Keywords: guitar, blues, scale, minor, pentatonic, major, riff, lick, learn, play, lesson

Id: BgRzzvVWBrU

Length: 10min 0sec (600 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2010