3-3 · In-Position Pentatonics: Building Blocks

If you have spent any time with pentatonic scales, you have almost certainly met the five box patterns. This one is usually called Form 1, and for most guitarists it is the first scale shape they ever learn.

The standard advice is to memorize all five patterns along with the order in which they appear as you move up the neck. That works, but it isn't necessary, and treating each pattern as a separate thing to learn rather than one more view of a single structure is a large part of why players end up feeling stuck in the box.

Rebuilding Form 1

Pick a root note anywhere on the fretboard. We'll use the A at the 5th fret of the low E string. Put your index finger on it, which, as we saw in 3-2, calls for a rectangle. Its lower string falls off the edge of the fretboard, which is fine. From there, rectangles and stacks simply alternate as you move up the strings.

The stack sits directly on top of the rectangle, with no gap and no overlap. The second rectangle does not: moving from the G string to the B string crosses the warp, so it lands one fret further toward the bridge than it otherwise would. The rectangle and the stack are not two separate shapes coping with the warp individually, but neighboring pieces of one repeating pattern, so the warp shifts everything above it.

What comes out is exactly the in-position pattern that most players learn as a separate item, except that now you can see where the root and the ♭3 sit inside it. Every other interval works the same way, which is what lets you deliberately choose a sound rather than hope to land on one. It also works identically on a four-string bass or an eight-string guitar.

The other four forms

Now put your ring finger on the 5th fret of the high E string, two octaves above where we started. A ring finger on the root calls for a stack, and this time it is the top string of the shape that falls off the edge. Below it comes a rectangle, and below that, the top two strings of another stack. This is Form 5.

Here the warp is crossed in the other direction, so the shift reverses: the rectangle sits one fret closer to the nut than it otherwise would.

Memorize this: Crossing the warp from the lower strings to the higher strings shifts the pattern one fret toward the bridge. Crossing from the higher strings to the lower strings shifts it one fret toward the nut.

Three more. Ring finger on the A at the 12th fret of the A string: a stack on the three lowest strings, a rectangle across the warp, then the lowest string of another stack. That is Form 3. Index finger on the same note: a rectangle, a stack across the warp, then one string of a second rectangle. That is Form 4. Same root, different finger, different form. Ring finger on the A at the 10th fret of the B string: a stack, a rectangle below it, then the top string of another stack. That is Form 2.

Wherever you start on the fretboard, you land on one of these five patterns, and all five are built from rectangles and stacks.

The names Form 1 through Form 5 are worth recognizing rather than memorizing, and there is an easy way to keep them straight. The Form number is the position of the pattern's lowest note within the minor pentatonic scale. The lowest note of Form 1 is the root, the 1st note of the scale. The lowest note of Form 5 is the ♭7, the 5th note of the scale.

Exercise 3-5: Choose a root anywhere on the fretboard, build the in-position shape around it out of rectangles and stacks, and play up and down the scale in position. This is not a speed exercise. The point is to reinforce the visual structure, to notice where the roots and ♭3s are as you pass through them, and to get comfortable alternating rectangles and stacks as you cross the strings. Play it over a drone, as in 3-1 and 3-2, and keep listening to how each position in the rectangle and the stack sits against the chord. Over a major drone, don't forget to bend the ♭3 a little.

Here is that exercise applied to the shape we built first: