dissecting music

Every instrument has it’s own anatomy. When the instrument builders first came up with their designs, they had to find practical solutions in organizing the frets, keys or buttons that trigger the notes, so that they could be played in combination, with as little effort as possible. The results of these century-old traditions can be seen on instruments like the piano, the accordion or the guitar. Literally hundreds of chords and scales can be played on those with only little physical effort. Still, one has to understand the anatomy to be able to find and execute all of those. I am not a master of any of those instruments, but in my years of musical exploration I have learned a good deal about finding the right notes, particularly on the guitars fretboard. This article is about the guitar and will explain how it is organized and how any scale can be practiced efficiently.

A melodic framework for the guitar

Remember the CAGED-Shapes from the guide to arpeggios on the guitar? That’s our framework – But today we’ll use it to dabble with pentatonics.

Just like with the arpeggios, we can play our pentatonics in 5 different shapes, each similar to one of our open chords. The shapes fit together like puzzle-pieces. The C’s represent the note C and all it’s octaves, but since we are dealing with moveable positions, this would also work in any other key. Pentatonics represent another one of those melodic structures I talked about in the arpeggios article. For fingering, the same rules as for arpeggios can be applied:

• The shape provides the starting point and range of the scale

• The middle finger serves as anchor point

• Stretches occur between the ring finger & pinky, and the middle & index

• No stretches occur between middle & ring finger (except on rare occasions)

These fingerings allow you to play anything anywhere and are designed to make sure you never run out of fingers. Let’s now talk about what Pentatonics actually are and how you can map their notes onto the guitars fretboard.

• The formula for Major Pentatonics is 1 2 3 5 6.

• The formula for Minor Pentatonics is 1 b3 4 5 b7.

But. There is a catch to this. If you start the major pentatonic on the sixth degree you’ll get the order of intervals of the minor pentatonic. It would be now a minor pentatonic scale (with the former sixth degree of the major pentatonic scale being the root). Vice versa, if you assume the minor pentatonics flat third to be your root, you’ll get a Major Pentatonic in the assumed roots key instead. You see, these are called relative keys. Every major key has a relative minor and every minor a relative major. This is very important to know, as it can be used with great effect in music. We’ll get to this in a minute. For now, here are the 5 Pentatonic Patterns with all the notes:

The C-Shape Pentatonic Pattern. The lowest root note is to be found on the A string and should be fingered with the pinky.

And the A-Shape Pentatonic Pattern adjacent to the C-Shape. In this shape, the root is played with the middle finger.

Here we have the G-shape. Contrary to the moveable G-Shape chord, the Pentatonic Pattern is very comfortable to play. The root is on the low E-string and should be played with the pinky.

Then there is the E-shape.  The middle finger is assigned to the root on the E-string.

And lastly, Shape D. The root is on the D-string. It can be fingered with either the middle finger or the index, the latter being more practical if more notes are added.

Once you memorized the Major Pentatonic shapes, you can also use them to play Minor Pentatonics, just as explained earlier. The following  pictures will help in illustrating this.

On the right you can see the pentatonic patterns we just discussed, with the root making the structure major. On the left you can see the same patterns again, but with a different root – allowing you access to the relative minor in each of them. The C-shape can also be used to play A minor shaped pentatonics. I still think of it as the C-shape though (Actually after a while you won’t have to think of the shape names at all).

Make sure not to confuse the shape names with the actual chords. You can play any chord using any of the shapes – they are just named after chords, because of their resemblance with the open chords. So, the relative minor of a C major chord played in C-shape will be A. The same is true for any other C major chord like for example the one in the G-shape. But would you play, let’s say an E major chord in C-shape, then you’d find your relative minor chord to have C# as it’s root. In case you don’t get it, just try it out on your guitar. If this is still confusing to you, don’t panic – if you practice those shapes and try them out a bit in a practical context it will soon explain itself.

Unlike the arpeggios, in my humble opinion, it makes little sense to practice these melodic structures in the circle of 4. The best way to practice pentatonics is to use backing tracks. They are plentiful on Youtube. I’d recommend QuistTV and NowYouShred. Quist tours with Brian Ferry and I had the pleasure of meeting him in person once, when I won a facebook quiz. His specialty are modal backing tracks, but there are also plenty of nice Blues-backings on his channel. Try using minor pentatonics over major blues Tracks! On NowYouShred you can find some really nice Pink Floyd stuff amongst other things. Pentatonics also work wonders for those. Practice each shape individually first. Once you’re comfortable, group two of them together and practice switching between them. While doing so, you don’t have to strictly adhere to the fingering patterns (those are ment for tight position playing and find more use in jazz). See what feels natural to you. Try to explore as many note combinations as possible and try incorporating some whole note bends. You’ll auomatically tend to repeat stuff that sounds good to you.

This concludes the melody introductory series. Soon we’ll take a look on Major Modes, as those can be easily constructed using the pentatonic framework. See you then and may the muse be with you.