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Your First Pentatonic Scale

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This tutorial has been conceived for beginner guitar players who want to go beyond strumming chords and start playing scales all along the fretboard.

Learning how to play scales is a great way to expand your musicality and exercise your fingers agility; one of the easiest scales to learn at the beginning of your lead guitar adventures is definitely the scale pentatonic.

We’re going to see the pentatonic scale in open position, that means that the shape of the scale uses some open strings. This decreases the complexity of the fingering and makes easier to play great melodies.

What is a Pentatonic Scale
In the word “pentatonic”, “penta” means “five”, in fact a pentatonic scale is composed of 5 notes (in this tutorial we’re not going to investigate the historical origin of this scale, you can find an interesting article on that here)

We already know the major scale. In the key of C, the major scale is:

C D E F G A B

By definition, a major scale pentatonic is like a major scale, without the 4th and 7th degrees. Thus the C major scale pentatonic is composed of the following notes:

C D E G AContinue Reading

Chord Progressions For Minor Pentatonic Soloing

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The minor pentatonic scale is the most used scale for soloing and it is used in a wide variety of music styles like pop, rock, country, metal, blues and more. It’s a great scale because it’s fairly easy to play which makes it a perfect beginner scale for soloing, but it also has the functionality to develop, expand, and improve your skills to high levels of advanced playing.

Once you know how to play the minor pentatonic / blues scale and how to use it for soloing purposes, you want to know over what chord progressions you can play the scale. There are a few ways to go about this.

Let’s dive in!

MINOR KEY CHORD PROGRESSION

Like the natural minor scale, you can also use the minor pentatonic scale to solo over a song or chord progression in a minor key. We will use the chords derived from the natural minor scale to build your minor key chord progression.

Here’s the formula to find the chords to your progression:
I=minor, ii=dim, III=major, iv=minor, v=minor, VI=major, VII=major

For instance, if you want to use an A minor pentatonic scale to solo over a song or chord progression in the key of A minor you start with filling in the notes of the A natural minor scale to the formula.

For example:
A natural minor scale (A Aeolian mode) = A B C D E F G
Formula for finding the chords = minor – dim – major – minor – minor – major – major
Chords for the progression: Am – Bdim – C – Dm – Em – F – G
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3 Cool Blues Guitar Licks for Soloing (50CBLI)

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3 Cool Blues Guitar Licks for SoloingToday I’ll show you 3 cool blues licks from the 50CoolBluesLicksImprovisation Course. (See below this post for more info).

Blues licks are an essential part of learning to solo and improvise on your guitar. They are small parts/fragments of an entire solo. You can see them as the beautiful words that spice up your story line, bringing drama, elegance, juice, soul, and excitement to your soloing. You can incorporate licks into your solos, copy them, learn from them, rip them apart, and rebuild them to create your own.

Building a vocabulary of licks expands your musical ideas and insight, and gives you greater flexibility in your soloing and improvisation.

Know that blues licks are not just for blues music. They are used widely in rock, country, jazz, pop and many other styles of music. They are beneficial to your playing in every way.

So let’s get started.

Enjoy!

blues lick 34

blues lick 11

blues lick 41

If you want to learn more cool blues licks, how to create your own, connect licks together, learn to solo and improvise all over the neck, and dive into the scale shapes, tricks and tools to really master the Pentatonic / Blues Scale inside out, check out:

The 50CoolBluesLicksImprovisation Course

Get Your Soloing and Improvisation Skills to the Next Step!

What Scales to Play over a Song in a Major Key

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what scales to play over a song in a major keyThere are so many songs and so many scales. So what scales do you need to solo and improvise over a song in a major key? And what chords can you find in a major key?

First, when a song is in a major key, it means it’s based on a major scale. The song usually conveys a bright, happy or cheerful mood. There are seven chords that you can derive from that major scale. We’ll look into that in a few seconds.

To be able to improvise over a major key you also need a major type scale. The two most commonly used scales are the major scale and the major pentatonic scale.
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