Learning Guitar Scales

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Pentatonic guitar scales are easy to learn, but they seem a little confusing when you try to learn them in any position on the fretboard, So i will give you some advices that will help you learn them when learning guitar scales easily.

1- Try to apply them in every key on the fretboard (both major and minor pentatonic guitar scales), doing that will let you memorize better the shape of the scales so you can play them starting from their root note.

2- The second thing to do is to memorize the intervals used in each one of them, so you can play and understand them well, you'll also be able to differentiate between them (major and minor sounds) and that will help you a lot when you try to play them on any given chord progression.

3- Try to apply these scales on every position on the scale, let's say starting from the second note or the third one...etc, this will make you able to play the pentatonic guitar scales in every note on the fretboard in a specific key.

4- The last thing to do is to try to improvise, just play these scales with songs you like to help you get used to them.

If you follow these easy steps of learning pentatonic guitar scales when learning guitar scales, you'll be able to play these scales easily and you'll impress your self and your friends if you like.

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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.