Beginner Guitar Lessons – How to Learn the Major Pentatonic Scale and Have More Fun With Your Guitar
Guitar players often come in contact with a pentatonic scale early in their guitar playing adventures. Did you know there are many types of pentatonic scales?
Technically speaking any group of five five notes would qualify to be a pentatonic. Now, that’s pretty scary isn’t it!
Fortunately, we only need know two types of pentatonic combinations, the major pentatonic and the minor pentatonic to produce the sounds we hear on the majority of commercial recordings.
It’s essential for the advancing guitarist to know both major and minor pentatonic combinations as these versatile notes will inject your guitar playing with exciting, dynamic and colorful sounds adding a new level of interest for the listener.
Major pentatonic structure: We construct the major pentatonic scales be taking a diatonic major scale and omitting the 4th and 7th notes of that scale.
examples:
C major diatonic
C D E F G A B C
C major pentatonic (five notes)
C D E G A
G major diatonic
G A B C D E F# G
G major pentatonic (five notes)
G A B D E
A major diatonic
A B C# D E F# G# A
A major pentatonic (five notes)
A B C# E F#
Major pentatonic scale application: country, folk, country rock and easy listening commercial/adult radio songs.
Even though the minor pentatonic is often touted as the ideal group of notes for every musical situation guitarist’s with street smart practical band experience will know that the minor pentatonic combination is not the best choice for certain songs.
Let’s compare the notes in the two types of pentatonic scales.
C major pentatonic – C D E G A
C minor pentatonic – C Eb F G Bb
As you can see certain notes are common to both scales, however you will notice a number of notes that differ.
This explains why a novice guitar player can be playing away blissfully unaware of the differences in pentatonic scales … until they play a sour note, which they then try to camouflage by bending or sliding all over the guitar fretboard desperately searching for a better sounding note.
Of course, it would have been much better (and less embarrassing) to have determined which scale was the correct choice for your particular musical project … before landing in a sticky musical
situation.
Many players just shake their heads and walk away from the whole scale/theory aspect of guitar playing believing that it’s all too much bother.
Remember, your ear will only take you so far … that’s where quality musical theory can help you (a) find the sounds you are hearing in your head and (b) assist you in understanding the language of music.
There’s no point wasting valuable time re-inventing the musical wheel!
I invite you to use these tips and tools when you play the guitar.
And now I’d like to invite you to get free access to my “How To Remember 1,000 Songs” eCourse. You can download the course for free at: => http://www.guitarcoaching.com
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