From the course: Acoustic Guitar Lessons: Intermediate

Rule the fretboard in five Notes—the major pentatonic scale sliding fingering

From the course: Acoustic Guitar Lessons: Intermediate

Start my 1-month free trial Buy for my team

Rule the fretboard in five Notes—the major pentatonic scale sliding fingering

“

- Rule the fretboard in five notes. Now the pentatonic scale is such a great and important scale to know for soloing and improvising for the guitar. Let's check out how to play an A major pentatonic scale in position. (guitar playing) Now instead of playing it in one position like that, you can actually shift up the fretboard in a relatively simple way like this. (guitar playing) Now the last note I ended on was an octave higher than the first note, okay? This is A. (guitar string vibrates) And the next note is A up here. (guitar string vibrates) By looking at the third A... (guitar string vibrates) We have three octaves. (guitar strings vibrating) This one being two frets apart, two strings apart, the next one being two strings apart but three frets apart. And what's great about looking at things in a diagonal shape like that is that you can play the exact same shape and position just moving it through the different octaves, like this. (guitar playing) And back down. (guitar playing) So by looking at things diagonally, it's a simple thing. No matter what melody or line you play, you can just transfer that up an octave without relearning any different fingering, so it's somewhat simple. Now let's try using that in a musical context. Let's check out this next example. One, two, three, four. (guitar playing) Alright, now learning scales is really fantastic. It's great, and you should practice scales going up and down just to get faster and work on your musicianship and virtuosity, but it's also important just to learn how to play melodies, and to really sit into a groove so that as you're improvising you don't rush or drag and you really still carry the rhythm, and also have good phrasing. So let's check out an example that uses phrasing and works on your sense of melody. Here we go. This is called Let it Breathe. One, two, three, four. (guitar playing) Alright, let's check out a new pattern for this same pentatonic sliding idea. This one starts off from C on the fifth string, and it looks like this. (guitar playing) Let's check out Slip and Slide Jam, which uses more of these pentatonic sliding ideas. One, two, three, four. (guitar playing) So now that you've figured out these sliding major pentatonic idea, let's add the major scale notes back to it. So those are only two notes per octave. Major pentatonic goes one, two, three, five, six, so the scale degrees that you're missing for the major scale are the four and the seven. So let's add that back in. Here we have the major pentatonic, one. (guitar chord playing) Two. (guitar chord playing) Three. (guitar chord playing) And then let's add the four right here. (guitar chord playing) And then the five. (guitar chord playing) Six. (guitar chord playing) And let's add the seven right here. (guitar chord playing) And then just continue that in the next octave. (guitar playing)

Contents