Why Your Guitar Heroes' Pentatonic Scales Sound Better Than Yours
You know all your modal scales, but you struggle to sound like your guitar heroes? The solos you like have an ”open” sound that you can’t reproduce? You feel like you are ruining your melodies by playing too many notes? Surprising as it may seem, all this may happen because you are not using enough pentatonic scales in your playing. If you are like the majority of players out there, then you probably think that the pentatonic scale can be used in Blues and in Classic Rock, and that’s pretty much it. As I will show in a moment, this assumption can actually hurt your playing. In fact I used to believe this myself, so much that I didn’t spend time on pentatonic scales and most of the time I rather practiced diatonic scales and modes. You know, Lydian, Dorian, Mixolydian, and all that jazz.
But then I discovered that many of my guitar heroes — people like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Eric Johnson, and later Andy Timmons and Guthrie Govan (just to name a few) — were using a lot of pentatonic scales together with their modal scales. Except they made them sound different. I am not talking about phrasing (all these players have amazing phrasing of course), or timing, or tone. No, their notes sounded DIFFERENT on the backing track. It seemed that they could play a pentatonic scale and make it sound more like a modal scale rather than a simple pentatonic. As I discovered with time, all these players have mastered their pentatonic scales not only in terms of physical playing skills, but also in terms of music theory!
This puzzled me to no end, and it literally took many years for me to understand what these people were doing — and indeed there was a lot to understand! A complete theory of what you can do with pentatonic scale would require a book or two. And yet there are some simple tricks, great sounding and easy to understand that I would like to share with you. All these concepts are no secret — after all many great players learned them and use them, and I am hardly the first to ”discover” them. On the other hand, I don’t recall other articles on the net explaining these basics tricks in a clear and immediately applicable way, so here we go:
1 ”Shifting” the Pentatonic
Let’s start with a simple trick. Now, we all know that if we have a chord progression in A minor, then we can use the A minor pentatonic to solo on it. In fact it can’t get more basic than this. On the other hand there is a nice trick that you can use to make your solo more interesting: rather than using the A minor pentatonic, you can use the minor pentatonic which lays a perfect fifth above (7 frets), i.e. in this case the E minor pentatonic. As strange as it might seem to use the ”wrong” scale, the E minor pentatonic sounds great when played on a chord progression in the key of Am.
Let’s see why: the notes in the A minor pentatonic are A C D E G. The notes in the E minor pentatonic are E G A B D. As you can see immediately, the E minor pentatonic is simply the A minor pentatonic with a B rather than a C. This works quite nicely since the B note is still in the diatonic scale of A minor (A B C D E F G), and in fact the absence of the C note makes the scale sounds more ”open”.
Of course, you are not bound to use only the A minor pentatonic or the E minor pentatonic: you can mix and match them as much as you like. I have prepared a video on advanced pentatonics to show you some tips on how to integrate together the two pentatonic scales.
If you are soloing on a major key, the same trick applies to: If you are in A major you can use either the A major pentatonic or the E major pentatonic. Just move from the ”standard” pentatonic to the one 7 frets above.
As I stated before, this is a very simple trick but its simplicity is actually a virtue: you can pull it off anytime, it’s quite useful and can breath new life into your soloing.
2 Altering the Pentatonic
Another interesting concept one can use with pentatonic scales is to ”alter” the pentatonic. This means that we take your regular pentatonic scale and we strategically change one note. The resulting scale is still pentatonic-like in shape: it can still be played in patterns of two notes per strings or in any other way you would play a regular pentatonic scale, but the sound that you can get out of it is completely different.
Which note should we change, and how? Well, it depends on exactly what you are trying to achieve here, and there are many possible ”altered” pentatonic scales. One simple example that I want to show you here is to take again our A minor pentatonic, and every time there is a C note in the regular scale we play a C# instead. The resulting scale (A C# D E G) is a great scale you can use over an A7 chord. As such it is a perfect scale to use over a Blues or bluesy song. If you need help in seeing how this can be used, please watch this pentatonic scales video.
This scale is very popular, so popular in fact that many names were given to it: Dominant Pentatonic, Mixolydian Pentatonic, Jeff Beck scale, Jan Hammer scale, …Quite confusing! To make things worse, for some musicians these same names may refer to other similar scales, so if you find this names in other books or articles be sure to verify what notes are actually used!
3 ”Modal” Pentatonic
Another thing that we can do is to use a pentatonic scale to suggest a mode. Again this can be done in a number of different ways, definitely more than I can possibly list here. Since I am a proponent of quality over quantity, let me just show you one of the possibilities that sounds best to my ear. I am a great fan of the Lydian mode (if you ever listened to Joe Satriani or Steve Vai, you know how Lydian sounds), and yet most of my favourite players rarely use the whole Lydian scale as it is. So what do they do instead? You guessed it, they play a pentatonic scale!
The idea here is to ”shift” the pentatonic not unlike what we did on point 1 above, but in a more creative way. On an A Lydian backing track we are going to play a G# minor pentatonic. At first sight, this seems completely wrong and not bound to end well, but if we look more in depth we can see why it works. The notes in the A Lydian scale are A B C# D# E F# G#, and the notes in the G# minor pentatonic are G# B C# D# F#, so as you can see all the notes of the G# minor pentatonic are also present in the Lydian scale. In a sense, we can say that the G# minor pentatonic is ”contained” inside the A Lydian scale.
But if the G# minor pentatonic contains only notes from the A Lydian scale, why should it sound any different? Why should we use it and not just play A Lydian instead? Well, because not all the notes in A Lydian are in the G# minor pentatonic, that’s why. Since some notes are ”missing” (i.e. the A and the E) then the G# minor pentatonic has ”holes” in it that will make your solo lighter and more interesting at the same time. You might have heard the old adage ”it’s not the notes you play, it’s the ones you don’t play”. Well, that is an example of it: by NOT playing some notes, your solo acquires a different flavour than using all of them. Don’t take my word for it, if you don’t believe me, you can try for yourselves or you can watch the explanatory video on pentatonics that I prepared for you.
The Secret Is In The Sound
As you can see, the old pentatonic scale has some more tricks up its sleeve than expected. In fact, a judicious use of pentatonic scales can make you play in a completely different and more interesting way than banging your diatonic scales up & down the fretboard. The focus of all the tricks I just explained is how they SOUND, not how to play them (I am confident that all of you know how to play a pentatonic scale). Just READING about them is probably not enough for you to really grasp entirely what you can do with this approach and some creativity. I always promote the idea that music theory must be heard to be understood, and this is why I prepared for you a video that showcases these tricks in a real application and in it. You will also find some more tips to make it easier for you to integrate these ideas in your skill set. To see the video, just click on the button below:
