We’ve done a lot of rhythm guitar work in the past few months, but just a little lead work. So this week we are going to take a giant step toward making good lead guitar players out of all of you.
We’re going to learn our pentatonic scales, class.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with the word pentatonic, let’s do a little etymology to get started. The prefix “penta” might ring a bell for you. Remember pentagons from geometry class? Those were the shapes with five sides. “Tonic” in the case is not referring to the band of the same name, but to the word “tone.” So put them together and you get “five tones.” So guess what a pentatonic scale is? You got it—a scale with five notes, or tones.
Let’s take a look at this so-called five-toned scale. Here it is in open position E minor:
E-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- B-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- G------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- D--------------------------------------0------2-------------------------------------------- A----------------------0------2-------------------------------------------------------------- E------0------3----------------------------------------------------------------------------
There are six notes there, but the first and last are both the root note E, so they just count once. If you continue the scale on up, you get through the second octave, like this:
E-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------0- B---------------------------------------------------------------------------0------3------- G----------------------------------------------------------0------2----------------------- D--------------------------------------------0------2-------------------------------------- A------------------------------0------2---------------------------------------------------- E--------------0------3--------------------------------------------------------------------
Notice how the open note is played on every string. This will be very important further on.
Now you might ask, why is this scale so important? For one thing, it is the basis for the entire genre of blues, the heart of rock and roll. For another thing, it is made up of the dominant notes in the scale.
See, for each major and minor key, there is a corresponding pentatonic scale that is made up of the most dominant notes in the scale. To put it a little simpler, the pentatonic scale is the best notes from its corresponding key. These notes sound good together, no matter what chord in the key they are being played over.
Finding the right pentatonic scale for the key that you want to play in is simple. Just begin with the root note. To play a minor pentatonic, bar your index finger across the fret where the root is found on the E strings. In the example above, E is the root, so the index finger would bar the zero fret. But since the zero fret is an open note, the barring is not necessary. To find G minor pentatonic, you would bar your index finger across the third fret (the location of the note G on the E strings) then follow the same pattern as the example above, skipping three frets on the E strings, three frets on the B string, and two frets on the other strings. Here is how G minor pentatonic would look:
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