Pentatonic Gear Shift Overdrive: Horizontal Shifts

This lesson builds on the Pentatonic Gear Shifts lesson. One of the most challenging parts of the original method is visualizing a two-string shift when you move from a ii or IV chord to a iii or V chord. This lesson provides a much easier way to make that move, illustrated with examples from the "Little Wing" changes.

Pentatonic Gear Shift Overdrive: Horizontal Shifts

In the Pentatonic Gear Shifts lesson, I demonstrated that to improvise over many chord progressions, you can shift the familiar pentatonic patterns up or down one string set, essentially using a family of three pentatonic scales to target chord tones for each chord in the progression.

In this lesson, we’ll extend that technique to another dimension: horizontal shifts. This is one of several useful extensions to the Pentatonic Gear Shift methodology.

Review of the Pentatonic Gear Shift method

As we saw in the previous lesson, if the chords in a chord progression come from a single underlying major scale, the roots of the minor chords line up in a column three frets below the roots of the major chords:

These three pentatonic scales are closely related. If we start from the “vi/I” scale and shift the geometric pattern up one string, we get the “ii/IV” scale. If we shift it down a string, we get the “iii/V” scale. We just have to adjust for the warp whenever part of the pattern crosses it.

This technique works really well, but sometimes you have to transition from the “ii/IV” directly to the “iii/ V” scale (e.g., moving from Bm (iii) to Am (ii) in the “Little Wing” progression) or vice versa. Shifting a pattern by two strings at once is a lot harder to visualize than shifting it by one.

If this introduction is at all confusing, I recommend reviewing the original Pentatonic Gear Shifts lesson before continuing.

Horizontal shifts

If we consider the major scale, most adjacent notes in the scale are a whole step—or two frets—apart. In fact, if we move the entire “ii/IV” pentatonic scale up two frets, we get the “iii/V” pentatonic scale. This works in reverse as well. If we move a “iii/V” pentatonic scale down two frets, we get the “ii/IV” pentatonic scale.

And since we’re not shifting across strings, we don’t have to worry about the warp to do this. Any pentatonic scale shape you’re visualizing can just slide up (or down) two frets without modifications.

This means that we have multiple options available to us depending on which scale we are currently playing.

If we are playing the “vi/I” scale, our options are the same:

But if we’re playing the “ii/IV” scale, we have a new option:

And there’s a similar new option if we’re playing the “iii/V” scale:

This is everything we need for diatonic chord progressions, but we can generalize from it. Whenever we shift up a string, we are shifting the roots of the minor and major pentatonic scales up a 4th because adjacent strings are a 4th apart. Similarly, when we shift down a string, we shift the roots down a 4th. When we shift up two frets, we’re moving the roots up a whole step. Similarly, when we shift down two frets, we’re moving the roots down a whole step.

The generalization is that any time you have two chords of the same flavor (i.e., both are minor, or both are major), you can move the whole pentatonic scale pattern from one root to the other. We’ll see two examples of this in “Little Wing.”

Example: “Little Wing”

Let’s apply this augmented gear shift approach to the “Little Wing” chord progression.

When we mapped it out in the original lesson, we found that the Em and G pentatonic scales were our “vi/I” scale. The Am and C pentatonic scales are the “ii/IV” scale, and the Bm and D pentatonic scales are the “iii/V” scale. The F chord is an outlier that requires special handling.

If we start playing in Form 1 at the 12th fret, we have a “vi/I” scale shape that covers the first two chords, Em (vi) and G (I):

To play over the Am (ii) chord, we would shift up one string to move from “vi/I” to “ii/IV”:

Then we shift back to play over the Em (vi) chord, returning us to the “vi/I” scale:

From there, we shift down a string to play over the Bm (iii) chord, moving from “vi/I” to “iii/V”:

So far, this is exactly what we would have done based on the original lesson, but at this point, we need to shift from “iii/V” to “ii/IV” to play the Am (ii) and C (IV) chords. Rather than shifting up two strings, we could opt to shift the current pattern down two frets:

From here, the next chord is G, so we need to go to the “vi/I” scale. To do so, we shift down a string (“ii/ IV” to “vi/I”):

Now, we come to the dreaded F chord. Since G and F are both major chords, we can use the interval between their chord roots to guide us. Here, we can just shift our current pattern down two frets to move from G to F:

Now, to get back, we need to move from F to C. We’re not currently playing any of our three core scales, so we need to think in terms of intervals. Since F is a 4th above C, we can shift down a string set to get the correct scale (“ii/IV”):

And finally, we can just shift up two frets to go from C (IV) to D (V):

Conclusion

Hopefully, the basics of shifting between the three core pentatonic scales are clear at this point. It’s definitely more complicated when you have non-diatonic chords like the F in “Little Wing,” and the calculations I did in the example to get into and out of the F chord would be challenging to figure out on the fly. However, if you study the chord progression ahead of time, you now have the tools to translate a wide variety of chord progressions into a series of simple vertical and horizontal shifts.

For the most part, it’s just a matter of keeping track of which of the three scales you’re currently playing and which one you need to move to next.

Try it out on some chord progressions, and let me know how it goes for you!