The pentatonic scale is probably the most commonly used scale for soloing in Blues and Rock music. As opposed to the major scale which has 8 notes, the pentatonic scale only has 5, making it easier to remember. These 5 specific notes create a bluesier feel, as opposed to the happiness of the major scale.
With fewer notes to work with, the pentatonic scale also allows you to worry less about how many notes there are and more about your creativity and ability to phrase those notes.
The major pentatonic scale is just a subset of the major scale. Thus if you've memorized the major scale, you actually already know pentatonic scale. To see this, let's take a look at major scale box pattern three:
and its corresponding major pentatonic scale box pattern, which you may have seen before:
As you may have guessed, there's a systematic way to turn a major scale into a pentatonic scale. To be able to understand how this is done, we can take the major scale and number each note from 1 to 8, where 1 is the root note and 8 is the octave. These numbers are called the degrees of the scale.
The major scale has 8 scale degrees. The 1st and 8th scale degree are the same because they are both the root note. Now, let's look at the scale degrees of the corresponding pentatonic scale box pattern:
Do you see which of the scale degrees were removed? It's the 4th and the 7th degrees:
Now it's your turn to put what you've just learned to the test! Turn each major scale pattern box into its corresponding pentatonic scale by clicking the notes you would remove in order to do so. A green checkmark means you were correct and that note should be removed. A red "x" means that note should have been kept.
Remember, to turn a major scale into a pentatonic scale, remove the 4th and 7th degrees.
Nice job! Now you should understand the relation between the major scale and major pentatonic scale and how to create each pentatonic box shape from the major scale box shapes. Here's a quick review of all the major pentatonic box patterns:
Just like how the major scale box patterns connect up and down the fretboard, the pentatonic scale box shapes do as well since they're derived from the major scale. Take a look:
Notice how the notes on frets 12 are equivalent to the ones on frets 0 because the box patterns cycle again.
Learning to play with the pentatonic box shapes up and down the fretboard is a great start to improvising. There are way less notes than the major scale and so the box shapes are easier to remember.
The time has finally come to reap the benefits of your hard work. By now you should know at least one box of the major scale and pentatonic scale and how they work. We can now apply all this information to what we've all been waiting for - creating solos and improvising!
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