One of my biggest pet peeves is when a guitarist says that they need to “break out of the pentatonic box” in order to sound good. I think that’s nonsense. No one needs more than five notes to sound good. A good player can make a memorable solo from just two or three notes.
What you do need, more than anything else, is to practice getting more out of the pentatonic scale. Vary your articulation. Use bends, slides, hammer-ons, pull-offs, and vibrato. Don’t just play up and down the scale, and be mindful of which notes you emphasize.
One of the biggest keys to sounding good when you improvise is to sound good when you practice. Whatever you do repeatedly in the practice room is likely to come out in your playing when you let loose. So always take your time and make what you play when you’re working on exercises as musical as possible.
As Vince Lombardi said, “Practice makes permanent.”
In this module, your goal is to learn the positions of all of the A notes on the fretboard.
The pattern for A is exactly the same as the pattern for E, except that it is shifted up five frets (or down seven frets). This exact pattern will hold for every note on the fretboard, so it’s worth noticing the overall shape. Here they are side by side:
Exercise: To practice this, use the same exercises you used in Module 1 to learn the E notes.
Memorize this: The major pentatonic scale has its root on the lower note of the upper string:
Because the stack shape contains two notes separated by an octave, where one stack ends, another begins. This creates diagonal pathways that make it easy to move around the fretboard quickly. Here are two complete A minor pentatonic diagonal pathways (these repeat every 12 frets, but only two complete pathways are shown):
Similarly, here are two complete A major pentatonic diagonal pathways:
Notice that the overall shapes are the same, but their locations differ because the root position for the major pentatonic is different in the stack than the minor pentatonic root position.
Memorize this: Don’t forget that you can always bend the upper note on the upper string to reach the same note as the upper note on the lower string:
As you did with the minor pentatonic stack in Module 1, you can practice the major pentatonic stack by playing a simple phrase in multiple positions on the fretboard.
Some simple phrases to start with:
Root-finding strategies:
Exercise 1-4: Mix and match phrases and root finding strategies.
This is the first A major pentatonic example played “in threes” in the video, and it is included so that you can check your work. I do not recommend learning to play these examples from tablature!
Here is the descending example in A major pentatonic:
Exercise 5: Play up and down the diagonal pathways in groups of three notes.
Exercise 6: Play a brief phrase inside one stack, then add notes to connect to another stack diagonally, and finally, play the same phrase again inside the second stack.
Before moving on, spend some time playing the A major pentatonic stack in every possible position on the fretboard and practice connecting stacks to each other diagonally.
This improvisation exercise is about using the A major pentatonic stack shape to play over a dominant seventh vamp in A, much like we used the minor pentatonic stack in the previous module.
As with the minor stack, the notes of the A7 chord always fall in the same locations relative to the stack, so you can use them across the entire fretboard. Don’t worry about the interval names here—we’ll cover intervals in the next module.
Note that you can bend the upper note on the upper string up a whole step to play the major third, and you can bend the upper note on the middle string up a half step to play the flat seventh.
The most dissonant note in the pentatonic scale is the major 6th (the upper note on the middle string), so use caution when emphasizing that note.
Memorize this: In this diagram, the red and blue notes are great target notes when playing a major pentatonic scale over a dominant seventh chord.
Exercise 1: Over an A7 backing track, practice making phrases using the A major pentatonic stack and diagonal pathways. Practice emphasizing each note in the stack to see how they feel.
Exercise 2: Practice alternating between the A major pentatonic stack and the A minor pentatonic stack. Notice that the minor pentatonic scale sounds slightly darker and more bluesy than the brighter, happier major pentatonic scale.
A7 Vamp
A · 85 BPM · 1 chords · 22.6s loop
Eight bars of A7, with the A major pentatonic stack on the board. Do the major-to-minor switch in Exercise 2 over this loop rather than in silence: the difference between bright and bluesy is a difference against the chord, and it mostly disappears when there is no chord to hear it against.
Exercise 3: Over the E7 backing track from module one, practice making phrases using the E major pentatonic stack and diagonal pathways.
E7 Vamp
E · 88 BPM · 1 chords · 10.9s loop
The Module 1 loop again, here for Exercise 3. Same backing track, different scale: E major pentatonic over it this time, where you used the minor stack the first time through.
Don’t forget to record yourself occasionally and listen back. This will help you gauge your progress and illuminate which aspects of your playing you should be focusing on in your practice sessions.
Consonance and dissonance are words to describe how a note sounds in a particular harmonic context. The more a note sounds “at home” when played against a particular chord, the more we would say that it sounds consonant. The more it “clashes” with a chord, the more we would say that it sounds dissonant. The same note can sound consonant over one chord and dissonant over another. The terms consonance and dissonance describe two opposite extremes of a single variable, so if a note is consonant, that means it is not dissonant.
The level of consonance and dissonance of a particular note is strongly predicted by the flavor of the chord (minor, major, dominant, diminished, etc.) it is played over and the interval between the note and the chord’s root. Good musicians learn those associations, so that they can predict how dissonant a note will sound before it is played.
Because each position in a pentatonic stack or rectangle (rectangles are covered in Module 3) is always the same interval away from the root of the scale, we can learn to associate different positions in the stack or rectangle with different levels of consonance and dissonance, even if we don’t know the intervals by name.
A great way to explore consonance and dissonance is to “freeze” a chord with an “infinite sample hold” pedal, and then experiment with how different notes sound played over it. I own and can recommend these two pedals, but there are several others available on the market:
No pedal? This holds the chord for you. Explore the stack over A, then retype the chord — Am, then A7 — and hear how each position's consonance changes with the chord's flavor.
A2 · C#3 3 · E3 5