Learning Guitar Scales

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One of the most used scales in music are pentatonic guitar scales, you probably will face them in almost every song you'll come across, they are widely used by musicians of most types of music: blues, jazz, country and even rock and metal.

Pentatonic guitar scales are scales that have 5 notes instead of the usual 7 notes per scale (major and minor scale), and that's where the name came from (Penta = Five and Tonic = Notes), that means 5 notes. These scales have 2 types: the Major Pentatonic and the Minor Pentatonic.

First let's have a look at the major pentatonic scale:

The major pentatonic scale is built with these intervals: Root - 2nd - 3rd - 5th - 6th, so it doesn't have the 4th and the 7th intervals. When you play it in the key of C for example you will get: C - D - E - G - A. and it looks like this on the fretboard:

E------------------------------------------------------------
B------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------2---5---------------------------
D-----------------2---5------------------------------------
A--------3---5---------------------------------------------
E-----------------------------------------------------------

The minor pentatonic scale is built with these intervals: Root - b3 - 4 - 5 - b7, so this scale doesn't have the 2nd and the 6th intervals, When you play it in the key of C you will have: C - Eb - F - G - Bb. and it looks like this on the fretboard:

E------------------------------------------------------------
B------------------------------------------------------------
G--------------------------3---5---------------------------
D-----------------3---5------------------------------------
A--------3---6---------------------------------------------
E-----------------------------------------------------------

Note: The intervals that i mentioned are compared to the major scale.

Learning pentatonic guitar scales are so important when learning guitar scales, i almost can't think of a song that doesn't use them, the fun part is that they are easy to learn.