You can read Understanding Guitar Scales Part I here.
You can read Understanding Guitar Scales Part II here.

Let’s continue our discussion of understanding guitar scales today by getting into pentatonic and modal scales.  Major scales were covered in Part I and minor scales in Part II. If you have any questions along the way, leave a comment below and I’ll be happy to explain further.

Pentatonic Scales For Guitar

Now we’re going to shrink our scales a bit.  Pentatonic means “five tone”.  All we have to do is eliminate a couple of notes from our regular major scale and we’ll have a major pentatonic.

C Major: C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C
C Major Pent.:  C  D  E    G  A   C

We’re simply leaving out the 4th and 6th scale degrees and that gives you a major pentatonic scale.

Remember our relative major and minor from before.?  We can do the same thing to find our minor pentatonic scale here.  Start from the 6th note of the MAJOR (not pentatonic) scale and that’s the starting note of your minor pentatonic.  Play the same notes as your major pentatonic and voila!

C Major Pent:  C  D  E  G  A  C
A Minor Pent:  A  C  D  E  G  A

Same notes!

Review Memorization Points: Which scale degrees are left out of a major to make a major pentatonic?
Which scale degree of the major scale do you start on to find the relative minor pentatonic?

For tips on using pentatonic scales in strange ways, check out this post.

I hope you’re starting to see how these guitar scales relate to one another.  We’re still mostly using the same set of 7 notes.  The only difference is the root starting on 1 or 6.  And those couple little alterations for the harmonic and melodic minors.  And of course, once you have the patterns under your fingers, they’re easy to transpose to any other key by just moving them up and down the neck.

At this point you should be able to play each of these five scales in the same one position.  Work on that until you have it down and can play some fluid melodies with it.  Your next step is to find two more positions (one at a time) to learn those scales in.  Again, check out this post to learn how to find new fretboard positions for your scales.

Once you’ve achieved that we can move on to some slightly more advanced ideas.  The further we get into these, the less common they are.  But feel free to play around with them.

Modal Scales For Guitar

Yes, they have mysterious Lord of the Rings type names like Mixolydian and Locrian.  Sounds more like Dungeons and Dragons characters than music scales.  But they’re much easier to deal with than it sounds.

Here’s the basic idea: If we can play C to C and call it major, and play A to A and call it minor, why can’t we play D to D or F to F?  We can.

Go back to your regular major scale pattern.  Instead of starting on C, start on D and play through to the next D.  Do the same for E, F, G, and B.

1st Mode (ie. C to C or Major) – Ionian – Exactly the same as major, just it’s modal name.
2nd Mode (ie. D to D) – Dorian
3rd Mode – (E to E) – Phrygian
4th Mode – Lydian
5th Mode – Myxolydian
6th Mode – Aeolian – Exactly the same as natural minor
7th Mode – Locrian

You can play all of those scales using exactly the same major scale pattern you learned before.  Just start on the appropriate note for the root.

Without getting too deep into the muck of which chords to use specific modes over, simplify it this way… Play each scale and decide whether is sounds “major-ish” or “minor-ish”.  That will give you a good idea of which kinds of chords to play the scale over.

Click Here to read Understanding Guitar Scales Part IV.

For more in depth guitar scale training, check out Guitar Scale Mastery.
Also check out the best all-around guitar training course I know, Learn and Master Guitar.

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