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A second way to play the changes. Instead of staying in one pentatonic scale and reaching for chord tones, you switch scales as the chords switch — major pentatonic for major chords, minor pentatonic for minor — moving the root to match each chord. It feels like a lot at first, but because every chord in a key is drawn from one parent major scale, the notes all line up. This lesson demonstrates the idea over a D–A–Bm–G progression and previews the shortcuts that make it manageable.
What follows is this lesson’s section of the Course Guide — you can read it here or in the full guide →
In Module 4, I introduced the idea of using a single scale to play over a chord progression, overlaying chord tones on the rectangle and stack as needed to target specific chords. In this module, we’ll explore a different approach: changing the scale to match each chord in the progression. One straightforward version of this is to play a major pentatonic scale over each major chord and a minor pentatonic scale over each minor chord, matching the root of each scale to the corresponding chord root.
This approach works well over many chord progressions, but in this module, we’ll focus on this one:
D - A - Bm - G
In Nashville notation (covered in Module 7), this is a I - V - vi - IV progression, which tells us that the progression is in the key of D major, and that all of the chord tones will fit the D major scale.
With the one-scale-per-chord approach, you would play the D major pentatonic scale over the D chord, the A major pentatonic scale over the A chord, the B minor pentatonic scale over the B minor chord, and the G major pentatonic scale over the G chord. It works in part because each of those four pentatonic scales is a 5-note subset of the 7-note D major scale.
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