Brief Description: What the Pentatonic Scale is, how it's derived from the major scale, why it works so well in Rock solos, a finger exercise to familiarize yourself with the the modes of the scale across the entire neck of the guitar and a cool background track to practice
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The root word "penta" means five. You know, like the Pentagon, the 5-sided building in Washington, D.C. The reason the Pentatonic Scale is named as such is because, you guessed it, it's a 5-note scale! So why do we call it the Penta-tonic scale? Let me give you my interpretation. The tonic note in any scale can be thought of as "home-base" for lack of a better description. A more official definition of the term tonic would be something like this:
Tonic: The key center, or foundation of, a scale or melody.
For example, in the key of G, the tonic is the G note. That means that every note in the G major scale is referenced back to the G note, i.e., the A is the 2nd, the B is the 3rd, the C is the 4th and so on. When you hear the notes of a major scale being played, you notice a very familiar set of note relationships. Two of the notes, however are very elastic in nature. An "elastic" note is one that creates harmonic tension and the listener has a tendancy to want it to move to another note rather than staying on that note. This is a very difficult thing to explain but is easily demonstrated.
Check out the fingerboard below. The notes of the G major scale are highlighted for you. When you click on any of the notes you'll hear the sound of that note and the G major chord strummed in the background. Sounding the chord in the background helps you to hear how each of the notes of the G major scale relate to the G chord. First you can step through each of the notes by clicking the STEP > button and then rewind. Now, click on the C note several times and listen to how it sounds. Notice that it really doesn't fit the G chord, however, you can move quickly to the B note and it sounds ok. However, if you continue to sound the C note while hearing the G chord in the background you'll find that it gets a little irritating to most folks. The C note is the 4th note of the G major scale. So we could say that the 4th note of the major scale creates a little tension in relationship to the tonic chord.
Now click on the F# note several times. It also creates a little tension in relation to the tonic chord, although probably to a lesser degree than the C note. All the other notes in the scale seem to fit the chord just fine. Give it a try, click all the other notes of the scale and see what you think. HOW IT IS DERIVED FROM THE MAJOR SCALE
As a review, you'll notice that there are 7 notes in any major scale. In the G major scale the notes as seen above are:
G A B C D E F#
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
If we remove the 2 tension-creating notes discussed earlier, namely the 4th and the 7th, we end up with a 5-note scale and there you have it! The pentatonic scale is just a major scale without the 4th and 7th notes. By removing these 2 notes, you get a very stable-sounding scale. All the notes of the G Pentatonic scale fit the G chord as well as many of the other chords in the key of G. Take a look at the notes once again without the 4th and 7th.
G
A B D E 1 2 3
5 6
When you play the notes of a pentatonic scale there is almost the sense that there is no tonic note, or home-base note because the scale just sort of rambles up and down never seeming to go anywhere, musically-speaking. That's why it is said to be PentaTONIC. It almost seems to have 5 Tonic notes. Playing up and down the scale, you'll notice that the Pentatonic Scale has almost an Eastern quality. If you've ever sat in a Chinese restaurant and listened to the music you'll recognize what I'm talking about right away.
"The More You Learn, the Easier it is to Learn More!"
