Learning the Minor Pentatonic Scale

The minor pentatonic scale is not only one of the most widely used scales in rock and modern music, but it is a key component that any guitarist must master to play lead guitar.  The cool thing about the minor pentatonic scale is that it allows you to go back and forth between the major and minor scale of a key with relative ease.  In this FREE guitar lesson, we take a look at the first position of the scale.  Watch the video below and then leave a comment to let me know how it helped or what else you’d like to learn.

Learning The Minor Pentatonic Scale for Guitar (Click if the YouTube Video below won’t load)

Hopefully that lesson was helpful to you and has got you ready to start practicing this scale.  I know that for me, it wasn’t until I began to really practice scales and compose musical pieces that things started really falling into place.  Being able to learn something and then apply it is a really important aspect of learning and starting to have mastery over something.

The one takeaway from this video that I’d want you to have is recognizing the shape and pattern to scales.  This is one of the things that makes learning them so easy.  Remember that we really only played two shapes over the six strings of our guitar.  There was playing the 5th and 8th fret (repeated three times, on the low E sting, the B string and the high E string) and then there was the other pattern of playing the 5th and 7th fret (repeated three times in a row, the A string, D string and G string…don’t laugh ).  Pretty easy right?

On a closing note, I want to stress that what takes you from being able to play and know a scale to actually sounding good with it, is to learn ALL the positions you can play that particular scale all over the guitar neck and then adding in little color pieces and techniques like hammer-ons, pull-offs, vibrato and slides.  Oh and let’s not forget adding in some Chromatic movements.  But those are things for future lessons.  So watch the video again, play along with the closing track and leave a comment below to share your thoughts.

Tags: minor Pentatonic Scale, Music Theory