If you’re not familiar with the formula for the natural minor scale, say “tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone” as you play Welcome! Minor pentatonic scales are the backbone to contemporary music, found in thousands of compositions ranging from the Beatles, to the Rolling Stones, to Cream, to Metallica, and in a huge number of musical genres. Let’s get to grips with this industry-standard vocabulary...
Studying scale shapes in an attempt to increase vocabulary is one thing, but actually making music out of them is a far more rewarding process Exercise 5 expands on the elements established in Exercise 2, producing five independent pentatonic ‘models’ that all relate equally to the tonic pitch Omitting the semitones from any seven-note scale will always produce some kind of pentatonic, as pentatonic…