The ultimate guide to the pentatonic scales for guitar (Major and Minor) - when & how to use - EP436

all right well i'm really excited about this week's lesson this is really more like a course there's so much information so many practice materials and all of that that go with this week's lesson we're going to be talking about the pentatonic scales major pentatonic scale and minor pentatonic scale and by the end of this you're going to have a full understanding of what they sound like how you use them when you improvise what all these patterns mean just really answering all the questions you've ever had about them at least i hope so so in this video we're going to cover everything that i talked about all the background information if you like the extra materials which are mp3 jam tracks so that you can practice some of this material there's tablature there's pdf sheets that have the the patterns broken down all of those extra materials are available at activemelody.com go to the weekly lessons page and do a search for ep436 all right so where do these pentatonic scales come from well penta means five and the pentatonic scales are five note scales and they come from the major scale believe it or not it's the good old major scale do re me right so if we look at the a major scale for example and we put a number to each of those one two three four five six seven each of those notes obviously once you get here you're back to one again you can eliminate two of those notes so the fourth and the seventh interval one two three four we'll get rid of that one five six seven we'll get rid of that one and then you're left with the major pentatonic scale so if i take out the fourth and seventh interval out of the major scale i'm left with the major pentatonic scale so now [Music] it sounds like this that would be the a major pentatonic scale the same is true for the minor scale or the natural minor scale so if we take a look at a minor that's the a minor scale now let's take two notes out of that scale we'll take out the second and the sixth interval one two we'll get rid of that one three four five six we'll get rid of that one and what you're left with then is the a minor pentatonic scale so it sounds like this so that's where they come from but then the question is wait why would you get rid of notes from from either of those scales from the major or minor the reason for that is those notes can be problematic when you're improvising in the key of a song let me say that again because this is this is kind of the heart of why the pentatonic scale is so important when you're improvising you know playing along with something and just sort of making it up on the spot and there can be lots of chords that are happening those notes that we eliminated can potentially clash with the chords but if we get rid of them somebody realized this along the way if you just get rid of them and you you're left with just the sweet notes that work those notes are going to work no matter what chord is playing as long as you're staying in the key of the song and that's how the pentatonic scales work and why they're so popular i don't even have to have heard the song before as long as i know what key the song is in and we're going to talk about that in just a minute as long as i know what key the song is in i can just play any of those notes and they're going to work and we don't have to worry about what the chords are or try and follow the chord changes or any of that but you can just stay in a pentatonic scale and it's going to work no matter what you play let me demonstrate this so it makes sense [Music] so the jam track is playing now in the key of a and these are all major chords this is in the major key which means i can play either major or minor pentatonic scale on top of that just depends on the mood i want to create i don't care what the chords are it doesn't matter i'm just going to stay in the key of the song so watch this this is major pentatonic scale we'll start with that a major pentatonic [Music] hear how happy it sounds now watch this minor pentatonic [Music] we'll go back to major [Music] go back to minor [Music] hear the difference happy more sad and it just depends on which one i choose if i want to go major or minor all right so i can already anticipate some of the questions out there somebody out there is going so wait a minute you can play the major and the minor pentatonic scale over the same chords and here's how that works the formula for that so you so pay attention to this this is a big deal if the song is in a major key like the one we were just playing over then you can use the major pentatonic scale or the minor pentatonic scale it just depends on the mood you want to create and that's what i was doing i was showing you that if i use the major pentatonic scale it sounded happy but if i played the minor pentatonic scale over those same major chords it sounded sad or more bluesy however if the song is in a minor key so you've got minor chords driving it as your tonal center for example then you can only use the minor pentatonic scale so basically to summarize if the song is in a major key you can use major or minor pentatonic scale but if the song is in a minor key you can only use the minor pentatonic scale all right so now that we've covered the background information and we've talked about what the pentatonic sound like let's talk about how to find it on our fretboard so we're going to be talking about the minor pentatonic scale first and when we talk about pentatonic scales there's patterns there's five patterns that are often talked about and these patterns are just regions of the fretboard they're just sometimes they're called boxes but really all the patterns are are groupings of those same five notes we've already discussed so when we talk about the a minor pentatonic scale for example it sounds like this right so that could be like one zone or one uh one pattern there's another one up here same notes right that would be another pattern then there's another one up here so that's what these patterns are they're just different areas to play those same five notes you can they're a lot of it is repurposed though obviously you can get into other octaves and things but that's really what's going on there and so there's five patterns but there's also five notes in the caged system c-a-g-e-d and so what i like to do is i like to connect the patterns of the pentatonic scale to the the notes of the caged system if you don't know what i'm talking about when i'm mentioning caged i'll put a link to a lesson up on the screen right now you can go to activemelody.com and do search for that lesson number and and learn what the cage system is but basically five patterns of the minor pentatonic scale right but five is a lot and there's really only three that i think are the big ones the ones that cover eighty percent of what you need to know there's two that we can just sort of push to the side we're going to be able to play the same notes with these three that we could with the five but i think it makes it a little easier so let's learn those three this is just my little system for this but i think it makes it a lot easier to learn so we're going to start with pattern one this is the big one this is going to be your home base and we're going to learn this in the key of a and so the first thing we're going to do is we're going to find our a chord using the e shape so that's where you're barring here on the fifth fret and then these three fingers are making the e shape if you like if you were to play an e chord in first position that's all cage system is it's just repurposing these first position chords so if i were to look at that where i'm barring there that's going to be my root fret so i'm going to take my index finger put it on the fifth fret first string so we have index finger fifth fret first string and then we have our pinky on the eighth fret first string and now we're going to play this we're going to play eight five on the first string and then we're gonna play eight five on the second string nice and easy then we're gonna come down to the third string and play seven five and then watch this seven five seven five so on strings three four and five we played seven five seven five seven five and then we come down to the eighth fret again on the sixth string and then down to the fifth fret and that's pattern one of the minor pentatonic scale and that's where so much music comes from is this area all of these notes that i was playing there just minor one minor pentatonic scale pattern one so okay so we've got that and a lot of you probably already knew that all right so that's pattern one let's move into pattern two now now i have a different way of looking at pattern two this is just my little system for it but i think it's a lot easier you know i think you're gonna agree with me so if pattern one is based off the e shape pattern two is based off of this d shape now in both cases here i'm playing the a chord but i'm using those as anchor points to connect my pentatonix to just so i have a instead of saying pattern two it doesn't mean anything but if i say play the a chord using the d shape that means something that's very specific so if i'm up here playing this and i look at where my middle finger is in this case it's on the ninth fret i can come to the the fret one fret right above it which is the tenth fret and then one fret right below it which is the eighth fret on the first string and those are the that's the top part of your pattern two so you have 10 8 and then you do the same thing on the second string 10 8 and then 9th fret 3rd string and that is what pattern 2 is to me just that now i realize the proper method would be to keep going down all six strings but here's how i do it instead of doing it the way that you might have learned it i think this is easier watch this we're gonna slide down with our middle finger back into pattern one why not you've already learned pattern one it's the same notes anyway and you can walk it all the way down to here so now i've got right that makes so much more sense than trying to learn it the other way and you can go backwards and so this is kind of like a little bridge between pattern one and pattern two and i just find that to be so much easier now if you want the proper listing of all of the or the proper diagrams for all five patterns i do have that in a pdf that's available at active melody just remember do a search for ep436 when you go there uh but we're just gonna learn it that way for now so now we've got pattern one pattern two right and by the way pattern two is where a lot of your classic albert king stevie ray von style blues comes from that kind of stuff robert cray i think of him playing in that region a lot okay pattern one pattern two we're going to skip pattern three and we're going to go up to pattern four and pattern four we're going to play the a chord again but this time we're going to use the a shape so we've used the e shape we've used the d shape and we're going to use the a shape [Music] now once we're up here that's where you've got a bar up here on the 14th fret i go up one more fret from that to the 15th fret first string and we're going to learn it like this so we have 15 12 and then we're gonna go 15 13 and then we're going to come down to the uh 14th fret third string so 15 12 15 13 and then 14th fret now we're going to keep going so we're going to come down to the 12th fret and we're going to go 14 12 again [Music] so we have [Music] now watch this from here i'm going to slide down two frets and we're going to go 10 12 10 12 10. it's a little box on all three strings there so 10 12 10 12 10 12 and slide up so really what you can see here is you've got a box a box a box and then another box here another box here now we're going to offset it and play this and then we come up to the first string now that to me that's really combining part of the third pattern with the fourth pattern but that is the most useful region because you can make so much music in this area you've got all of those classic kind of leonard skinner's style bends and things can happen up here we're going to talk through bending which notes you can bend as well but this would be pattern four of your minor pentatonic scale and is connected to your a shape e shape d shape and the a shape so quick recap of what we've learned so far we've learned the a minor pentatonic scale in three regions of the fretboard and we've connected those regions to chord shapes from the cage system so we started with the e shape and remember these are all a chords but a chord using the e shape we had pattern one then we had the d shape we had pattern two connected to that and then we had the a shape we connected pattern four [Music] so now we're gonna move on and we're going to introduce the major pentatonic scale but don't freak out it's the same shapes that we just learned we're just going to move them down we're just going to shift them down the fretboard a little bit so when we played pattern one the good old home base right for a minor pentatonic scale we had our index finger on the fifth fret first string and we had our pinky on the eighth fret first string that's how we fretted that now to play pattern one of the major pentatonic scale we're going to put our pinky where our index finger was fifth fret first string and we're going to put our index finger on the second fret first string and we're going to play the same shape that we played here so this time it's going to be 5 2 5 2 and then we have 4 2 4 2 4 2 5 2. that's the major pentatonic scale for a so you can see that this is kind of a pivot this is the connection point between the two you have minor up here and you have major here and they're connected by this fifth fret now if we go back to our same logic of connecting these two chord shapes this would be connected to the g shape out of the cage system which looks like this now again we're we're still playing an a chord but we're using the g shape if you don't know the cage system just skip that for now but that's what's going on and so with that i can play the a major pentatonic scale the same is true for the other patterns this is where why it's so easy and why guitar players and fretted instrument players in general love this so when we come to the a minor pentatonic scale pattern two we're gonna take that and we're gonna move that down free three frets just like we did this one two three so this is pattern two of the major pentatonic scale it's the same thing we did here we just moved it down three frets just like we did here so we were here and we went one two three frets down we're doing the same thing here one two three frets down you're connecting this now to the e shape so this e shape has the minor pentatonic scale pattern one and it has the major pentatonic scale pattern two and this is where it starts to get really interesting because you have both of these patterns or both of these scales i should say in the same region and so now you can start to blend them but we're gonna i don't want to get ahead of myself that's what's going on there and then we're gonna come down to pattern four of the major pentatonic scale we can do the same thing so here's pattern four the minor pentatonic we can go down one two three frets and we can play it like that or you can just connect it in your mind to the to the d shape just like we did before and where your index or where your middle finger is on the d shape that would be your this note of the major pentatonic scale pattern four and what i love about this area and i just covered this in last week's bb king lesson which was ep 435 if you want to check that out is you've got major pentatonic scale pattern four right there and right beside it your next door neighbor is minor pentatonic scale pattern two so there's your major sounds kind of happy and then right here [Music] you've got your sad your blues next door neighbor and so that's where that comes from so hopefully this is starting to all come into focus a little bit major pentatonic scale minor pentatonic scale they're the same shapes you just repurpose them now i know somebody out there is going to go wait a minute if this is a minor pentatonic scale and you move down here isn't that aren't you playing like f sharp you know f sharp minor pentatonic scale i am this is f sharp minor pentatonic scale but it's also a major pentatonic scale it just depends on the chord underneath it that's what defines it and so you always have to remember that the chord underneath it is what gives it its context so now you've got major pentatonic scale and minor pentatonic scale the one last thing i want to talk about is bending notes this comes up quite a bit which notes can i bend when i'm playing so let's go back to minor pentatonic scale pattern one if we look at the eighth fret first string you can do a full bend there and by the way a full bend means where you start the bend you're going up two frets so that's the note you're trying to hit same is true on the second string you can do a full bend on that note as well and then the same is true on the uh the seventh fret third string you do a full bend there so each of these notes you can do a full bend on now there's other places you can bend but i want to just keep this simple these are the main areas for bending strings uh when it comes to playing lead guitar so in your minor pentatonic scale pattern one you got a full bend there you got a full bend there and a full bend on the first string i don't really bend past the the third string once you get into the bending on the fourth string you can do it but it becomes more problematic those are your main ones okay in pattern two there's really only one note you can bend and that would be this top right corner at least from my vantage point so that'd be tenth fret first string you can do a full bend there that's for your albert king right when we come up to pattern four you have two notes you can bend you have this top right corner from this one which would be that 15th fret first string you can do a full band and then the 15th fret second string those are your bendable notes and they're always in that sort of top right corner if you think about it i'm not really bending with my index finger you could but i just to keep it simple for the most part those are those are the main ones so in pattern one you've got those notes in pattern two you've only got one and in pattern four you've got two and that covers your bendable notes for the most part the same is true in the major pentatonic scale those same notes are bendable in terms of the pattern so if we were to come down to pattern one of the major pentatonic scale for a you would bend fifth fret first string fifth fret second string and then fourth fret third string those are bendable notes right same is true for pattern two only the top right corner so in this case it would be the seventh fret first string and then the same is true for pattern four only the uh the twelfth fret first string and the twelfth fret second string and so now you have the full picture and by the way for premium members i do have practice material on practicing bending those notes i have lots of practice stuff that goes with this so if you're really serious about learning how to play this and and really understanding it you'll definitely want to check out premium membership even if it's just for this one lesson i think there's a lot so much value in just understanding this because once you understand this pentatonic scale you really have unlocked the fretboard in terms of being able to improvise easily okay so the last thing i want to touch on is overlap there's a few areas where the major pentatonic scale and the minor pentatonic scale overlap and real convenient areas for improvising and playing lead and the probably the most popular is when we talk about pattern one of our minor pentatonic scale again we're still in the key of a here but i also mentioned that pattern two of the major pentatonic scale was right here right in the same area and so if you look at this area that's a major pentatonic scale [Music] that's minor pentatonic scale you start to see this when you can picture when you can superimpose in your mind's eye the major pentatonic scale pattern two with minor pentatonic scale pattern one you have this little bluesy area [Music] where i can go back and forth between major and minor and it sounds so nice [Music] all of this is happening you can see when i play that that should make sense you should understand that that's the bottom of pattern two right and it's right there in the middle of your minor pentatonic scale now this is where it starts getting into other things because some people see this as the chord itself the chord itself is made up of that overlap in a way or the overlap is made up of the chord it depends on how you look at it but they're the same notes either way [Music] so that's the first area the other area is the one that i just talked about which is where i did the bb king lesson last week and again you can check that out the full lesson on that would be ep435 and actually that lesson is going to make so much more sense if you understand this information but basically you can come up here to pattern four of the major pentatonic scale and then pattern two of the minor pentatonic scale and they're in the same neighborhood and they share this note see this watch this one though i can land on this note and then over here i can go right and obviously the reason that that note works is it's an a note which is the key that we're in so that's the the other little sweet area is the pattern four of the major pentatonic scale pattern two of the minor pentatonic scale that shared region here it's very easy to pivot and go back and forth between the two and you hear bb king doing it all the time lots of other artists so i mentioned one thing i said the key they shared the a note i just want to end with this the last little thing when it comes to finding the key of the song you're in the way that i learned to do that initially if you don't know if let's say you're playing along with your favorite record well you're not going to know what key that song is in necessarily what you do is you just start with by the way start with a minor pentatonic scale that's a good one to start with just start by getting that sound in your head first but i what i do is i play the song and then i start with my open open string this is all done on the first string on the guitar and i just walk up until i find a match i just keep walking up the fretboard and at some point one of the notes is going to click and it's going to make sense even if it's not exactly the same note as the chord that's happening what you're looking for is the tonal center of the song there's a there's a certain note that just fits and once you find it if it were in the key of a for example if i find that i should be able to come up here with my pinky and go ahead and trace out that minor pentatonic scale and start to get that bluesy sound and if that happens if i'm able to do that then i know that i'm in the key of a and i know my a major pentatonic scale is down here and so forth it unwraps the whole thing but i have to start with that one note the tonal center just to find the key and remember you don't have to try and follow the chord changes when you're playing in the key of a song you just stay in your pentatonic scale you can just say major pentatonic scale or minor pentatonic scale however if the song is in a minor key you can only play the minor pentatonic scale all right so there's your pentatonic scale overview and the history of where they come from but let's not end there let's go into the practice material now that we have that knowledge come over to active melody and join me for part two where we'll go over the practice materials there's lots of practice stuff there's a jam track and a major key a jam track and a minor key and some practice material that go with that there's also some standalone practice material that you don't need a jam track for where we're going to practice which strings that you can bend and all of those fun things so you can get that by going to activemelody.com weekly lessons page and do a search for ep436

Channel: Active Melody

Views: 228,254

Keywords: pentatonic scale guitar lesson, the ultimate pentatonic scale lesson, the essential pentatonic tutorial, learn the pentatonic scales guitar, major pentatonic scale guitar, minor pentatonic scale guitar, guitar pentatonic scales, learn to improvise on guitar, guitar improvise, jam on guitar, guitar teacher online, learn guitar, learn the pentatonic scale

Id: sk36Tv6US6E

Length: 26min 8sec (1568 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 23 2021