The minor pentatonic scale is a five-note version of the full seven-note minor scale. That is the whole definition, and once you see it that way you stop learning two things and start learning one.
Nearly every guitar solo you have ever loved comes out of this shape. It is the first scale most players learn and the one a great many never really leave, which is less of a criticism than it sounds — there is a lot in it.
Start with the full minor scale
Here is the natural minor scale, rooted on F# at the second fret. Seven notes: F# G# A B C# D E.
Now take two notes out
The five gold-ringed notes above are the pentatonic — penta, five. Remove the second degree and the sixth, and what is left is this:
F#, A, B, C#, E. Two notes on every string, the same fingering on all six, and the shape sits in your hand almost immediately. That is not an accident of the guitar; it is why this scale spread across the world's folk music long before anybody wrote it down. Joe Bennett's radio segment on pentatonics has the same five notes sung rather than soloed — Hendrix, Khalid, Shania Twain — a good way to hear that the shape makes tunes, not just solos.
Why taking notes away makes you sound better
This is the part students find counter-intuitive, so it is worth being blunt about it.
The two notes you removed are the two that can sound wrong. In a minor key the second degree and the sixth are the notes that clash if you land on them at the wrong moment or hold them too long. Take them out and every note left in your hand sounds good over every chord in the key.
So the pentatonic is not a beginner's simplification of the real scale. It is a filter. It gives a player who cannot yet hear which notes are safe a shape in which they are all safe, and it lets them get on with the actual job — phrasing, timing, bending, saying something — which is where the music was hiding all along.
And when you are ready, the two missing notes are the next thing you add. They are the colour. Put the sixth back in and you have something that sounds like Santana; hold the second over the right chord and you have the ache in half of Fleetwood Mac.
This is not a blues scale — and there is no such thing as "the" blues scale
Guitarists use "pentatonic" and "blues scale" as though they were the same thing. They are not, and the second term does not name anything on its own, because there are two of them.
The minor blues scale is the minor pentatonic with one note added: the flattened fifth, sitting between the fourth and the fifth degrees. Six notes to the pentatonic's five. In F#, where F# minor pentatonic is F# A B C# E, the extra note is C.
The major blues scale is a different animal built the same way — the major pentatonic with the flattened third added. In F# that is F# G# A A# C# D#. It is the brighter, more country-leaning sound, and it will not fit where the minor one does.
So if somebody says "play the blues scale", the useful question is which one. Most of the time they mean the minor, because most of the time they are thinking of a minor-key blues.
The added note in either is what people mean by "the blue note", and it is worth knowing what to do with it: you pass through it, you do not sit on it. Played on the way from B up to C#, or bent into from B, it is the sound of the blues. Held on its own over a chord it just sounds out of tune, because it very nearly is.
Learn the five-note shape first. Adding one passing note to a shape you already own takes an afternoon; learning a six-note shape from scratch and then discovering that one of its notes behaves completely differently from the other five takes considerably longer and teaches you less.
How to practise it so it does not sound like a scale
- Play it over a chord, always. An F#m chord ringing, or a | F#m | Bm | C# | F#m | loop. Alone it is an exercise; over a chord it is music.
- Give yourself three notes and one minute. Pick any three notes of the shape and play nothing else for a full minute. This is the single most useful thing on this page. Running up and down five notes teaches you the shape; being stuck with three teaches you phrasing.
- Leave gaps. Most players' solos are too busy because silence feels like a mistake. It is not. Play four notes, stop for two beats, play four more.
- Move it. Root at the second fret is F# minor. Fifth fret, A minor. Eighth fret, C minor. Say the key out loud.
- Draw it. Print a sheet of blank fretboard diagrams — five necks, one for each box — and draw the shape from memory with the root ringed before you play it. Which bit you cannot draw is the bit you do not know yet.
- Then bend something. The pentatonic is where bending lives, and a bent note is worth ten played straight.
Where this goes next
The shape above is one of five positions that tile the whole neck, and the full seven-note scale it came out of is one of a family of shapes that share their notes with the major scale and the modes. That is the bigger picture, and it is on the scales-and-modes page.
The other half of the job is knowing which chords go underneath — because as ever, the chords are what tell your ear what the notes mean. There is a table for that.
