When to Play Major vs Minor Pentatonic [It's easier than you think!]

[Music] so here's a question for you to solo over a blues like this should you be playing major or minor [Music] over the next few minutes I want to end any confusion you might have about which scale to play when now this video is partly inspired by Leah andertons who I've seen say several times in his videos he's not always sure when to play Major versus minor now he's actually typical of a lot of players I see in that they can actually play really great but there's just this small Gap in knowledge holding them back now if you're one of those players then what you're about to learn is going to massively increase your confidence when the time comes to pull out a solo so to keep things simple all the playing in this video will be based around the first position minor pentatonic shape you know the one that looks like this [Music] we'll stick with this shape because most people will already be familiar with it and also because as we'll see later the pentatonic helps us navigate through some trickier chord progressions first up the basics of minor versus major so let's start really simple with a basic minor chord progression you're about to see me solo over a progression with the chords A minor D Minor E minor and then back to a minor as these are all minor chords this has a really dark sound now to know which scale we need to play we need to know which key the music is in and most of the time the key will be the same as the chord the piece ends on when it feels naturally resolved and this is often the same as the first chord too in this case it resolves back to an A Minor so the scale we can use is the a minor pentatonic starting at the fifth fret [Music] throughout this video I'll refer to this graphic which simply shows which chords belong to each of the main Keys we use for guitar as you can see a minor D minor and E minor all fit within the key of A minor so we're fine to use the a minor pentatonic throughout the piece so take a listen to the track and that I'll explain a little bit more about my Approach foreign [Music] so even though we're free to use any notes from the a minor scale at any time one thing you saw me doing frequently over that track was resolving my phrases back to the root note of a so we have three root notes within this pentatonic shape firstly here fifth fret the low E string this a and then we have seventh fret of the D string another a and then finally fifth fret the high E string yet another a so it's important to understand where these root notes fall so you can Target them and by landing on a root note at the end of a phrase it immediately brings out that darker minor sound of the scale so I started with a lick which resolved to the a here at the seventh fret the D string and then you saw me end up on this low a down here with a lick something like this so far nice and simple C minor chords play minor pentatonic but what about major chords so for the next track the progression will be C to F to G and back to C back to our graphic and you can see these three chords belong together in C major so we're in the key of C but you can also see that c major has a special relationship with a minor this is because a minor and C major scales have exactly the same notes just starting from a different point and these are known as relative minor and major keys not only does this mean that they fit with the same chords but we can also use the same scale patterns for both keys on the guitar this is true with every other key like D major and B minor E major and C sharp minor and so on now the exact same minor pentatonic shape we just used over a minor can also be used for playing over major Keys now in our shape the first note here always tells us which minor key we can use this shape over and the second note three Frets up always tells us which major key we can use it over so starting at the fifth fret where the a minor chord forms the scale gives us a dark minor feel but then starting from the eighth fret where the c major chord forms the same scale now has a bright major feel [Music] so we can use this exact same shape to play over both a minor and C major this is because a minor and C are what's known as relative minor and major cues and have exactly the same notes in their scale now whenever you have a minor chord you also have the relative major chord three Frets up as the first two notes of our pentatonic shape are three Frets apart it perfectly shows which minor and major Keys it will fit over so let's hear the track c f g and back to C I'll use that same pentatonic shape and explain a little more afterwards [Music] you'll remember earlier in a minor I was resolving to the root note of a well now to make this same shape fit over this major progression I simply resolved to the C instead so we have three C's to aim at here firstly here eighth fret of the low E then again here fifth fret on the G [Music] and then again eighth fret on the high e so over the track I start with a lick which results to this C in the middle here [Music] and then ended up by resolving down to this low C here [Music] so by simply changing which note I resolved to I change the same shape from dark and minor sounding to Bright a major sound in [Music] next up mixing major and minor together so now we've got the basics of minor versus major down let's look at some more chord progressions for the next track I'll be soloing over G to E minor to a minor to D and then back to G so this time we have a blend of both major and minor chords and the key is G major as we can see all these chords fit nicely within G major now even though there are minor chords in the progression we can still use the major pentatonic throughout so we know we need to find G major pentatonic but how do we do this well as we just saw the second note of our pentatonic shape tells us which major key it fits over so let's find a g on this low E string so we've got one here at the third fret but I'm going to use this one 12 Frets higher here at the 15th so let's play our pentatonic shape where this note is the second note of the pattern [Applause] and there we have it the G major pentatonic you may also notice that this is really the same as the E minor pentatonic and that's because G is the relative major of E minor a couple of things to look out for as you watch the track firstly I'm resolving back to this root note of G quite often over the G chord [Music] and then resolving some lines to E over the minor chords to create a darker sound you don't always need to resolve to the root like this but it can help outline the key and now secondly I'm using this bend a lot a full bend on the second note on the G string and you can pretty much do this at any point with the pentatonic because the note you'll hit in this case would be a b and there's a b in both G major and E minor chords so it always fits in really well so let's take a listen to the track [Music] foreign [Music] now to round out this part of the video let's look at a progression that starts minor and then ends major so this time the chords will be C sharp minor to G sharp minor to a and then e so it starts off really dark with two minor chords and then brightens up with two majors now this is really common that songs transition between minor and major feel like this and it would be really hard to say strictly which key this is in either C sharp minor or E major but as they're both the relative minor and major of each other the same scale works over both so let's see where C sharp is as our root note for our pentatonic shape and that's here the ninth fret on the low E [Music] so there we have C sharp minor pentatonic but then if we look three Frets up the second note of our shape is an e so we get e major pentatonic so let's go to the track and you'll see me start off by playing this phrase which hits the C sharp minor here to really outline the minor feel then later on you'll see me landing on E notes Here and here to really bring out the major flavor there's some faster licks in here as well but all I'm doing really is running through this pentatonic shape [Music] next let's look at the blues now when we play a typical Blues we can actually choose whether to use major or minor so you're about to hit a 12 Bar Shuffle in a major with the chords A D and E so the obvious place to start would be the A major pentatonic so we're looking for where a is the second note of our pentatonic pattern so that's going to be here this a of the fifth fret we get the A major pentatonic there which is the same shape as the F sharp minor pentatonic [Music] now one extra thing we can do is add in the blue note which we get here and here but technically this becomes become scale but it's essentially still our basic pentatonic shape we can just reach out to this extra note for some extra Blues feel [Music] as we're playing in a major key the root notes to resolve to are going to be these A's here here and here [Music] so take a listen this is playing the a major scale over an a major progression [Music] what you'll hear is this works fine but it's still fairly bright perhaps More Country sounding than Blues so if we want that darker smokier blue sound then we can actually use the a minor pentatonic scale over this a major chord progression so that a minor scale kind of grinds against the a major chord but in a good way and now once again we can add in that extra blue note here [Music] and here [Music] and this time as we're now playing minor our root note of a is here here and here so now listen to the track again and hear how the minor scale really brings out that extra bluesy feel [Music] foreign [Music] now the more sophisticated blues players will blend together major and minor and if you're interested in doing that then I've linked a video below but as a starting point just be aware that when you play Blues you can choose whether to play major or minor now let's move on to look at what happens when we get calls that don't belong together and how the pentatonic gets us out of jail so the next progression we'll look at is C to B flat to F then a minor to d to g then resolving back to C so this is in the key of C major but there's two chords that don't naturally belong to that key firstly the B flat without getting too deep seeing a B flat chord in C major could make you think you need to play C mixolydian for the first half because it contains a B flat instead of a B natural then for the second section this D major chord might Point towards a Dorian to get an F sharp into the scale instead of f natural which all gets a bit complicated but with C major pentatonic there's no B and there's no f so we don't need to worry if these notes are flat natural or sharp because they don't exist in our shape so using C major pentatonic over this progression it's gonna work great and in practice the pentatonic will keep you going through 95 of progressions in rock pop and blues music even when some out of key chords crop up so take a listen to the track and see how this simple pentatonic shape helps us easily navigate this more complex chord progression come on [Music] so I hope that was useful thanks for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Jules Guitar

Views: 340,773

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Id: MfrAepqfv2g

Length: 15min 48sec (948 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023