Originally published April 19, 2025
This lesson started with a question in one of the chats asking about Steve Khan's "Dominant 7th pentatonic scale" from the Pentatonic Khancepts book. Here's my take on how to think about and visualize this scale.
What follows is the written lesson — the full contents of the PDF handout, so you can read it here or download it above.
Last week, a Patreon subscriber asked a question about the Dominant 7th Pentatonic scale described in Steve Khan’s classic book Pentatonic Khancepts. At the time, I hadn’t read the book, but this week I took the opportunity to dig into it, and I found a lot of overlap with Pat Martino’s approach in his book Linear Expressions (as described in the “everything is pentatonic” lesson). I’ll have more to say about that later, as well as about the broader topic of modifying pentatonic scales, but this week, I wanted to do a quick lesson on Khan’s version of the Dominant 7th pentatonic scale.
A Dominant 7th pentatonic (or dominant pentatonic) scale is a five-note scale that is well suited to playing over a dominant 7th chord, and there are at least two different ways to construct one. A few months ago, I wrote a lesson describing one that Nuno Bettencourt has used. That scale starts from the minor pentatonic scale (R - ♭3 - 4 - 5 - ♭7) and raises the flat 3rd to form R - 3 - 4 - 5 - ♭7.
Notice the wide and narrow intervals in Nuno’s version of the scale. The combination of a major third interval and a minor second interval would make this scale challenging to use for melodic playing. Nuno gets away with it by using it in blisteringly fast licks, where the wider interval is a feature rather than a bug.
Khan’s Dominant 7th Pentatonic scale starts instead from the major pentatonic scale (R - 2 - 3 - 5 - 6) and raises the 6th a half-step to yield R - 2 - 3 - 5 - ♭7.
Khan’s version is easier to use for melodic playing since the intervals are more uniformly sized.
We can visualize this new scale by starting with the major pentatonic rectangle and stack:
Raising the 6th a half step alters the top string of the rectangle:
and it modifies the middle string of the stack:
It’s worth taking a look at how these modifications change the familiar six-string pentatonic patterns. We can start by visualizing the dominant pentatonic rectangle and stack as continuously alternating vertically on an infinite all-fourths fretboard:
Then we can create the five two-notes-per-string forms by selecting a set of six strings and sliding the top two strings one fret toward the bridge to account for the warp.
I find Forms 1 and 4 to be very comfortable to play, but it’s worth experimenting with all of them.
If you want to use this scale in practice, it’s also worth practicing the diagonal pathways. There are four of them to learn.
Finally, to take this even further, it could be worth exploring how to play the scale pattern on one string and learning where the rectangles and stacks intersect with the one-string pattern.
Don’t forget that the pattern “wraps” around at the end, so the three two-fret intervals are all back to back in this scale.
The dominant pentatonic scale sounds great over any dominant chord, including dominant 9th chords. It’s worth experimenting with using this scale in a blues context. In my brief experimentation, I found that it sounds even more consonant and melodic than the major pentatonic scale, especially over the I7 chord in a blues.
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