Lesson N 1 (Pentatonic).

This lesson will be useful for beginners, but it is possible that even some experienced musician can find something useful in it. If you want to play solo improvisation for the song while you do not have time to learn a lot of scales, this is the easiest way to solve this problem:

This sequence of notes is called A-C-minor or major pentatonc (note where are the A and C notes are placed to get the right pentatonic). If you play this finger from H note (6th string, 7th fret), you will get the H-minor or D-major pentatonic.

In this lesson I will not explain why did the pentatonic got that way and not otherwise, because the purpose of the lesson is not in the theoretical aspects, but in the technical details, so take all of the above as an axiom and we will go further :)

Generally there are 5 boxes of pentatonic. I still stop at first one, because it is the most known.

Let's go back to improvisation. If we have a progression (sequence) of chords in some key then first we have to define it. Suppose you have the G minor, therefore, G minor pentatonic notes would be the best to sound here.

What should we play if we've got a major key?
All is similar as in Minor case - we play pentatonic in appropriate key.

Now I will show some exercises on pentatonics (I will use A-minor).

Lets go to the specific exercises. You can download a video snippet of how to play this live, or you can download midi file and play it in a different tempo - from slowest to the fastest.

1. Exercise one (video) (midi)




2. Exercise two. (video) (midi)



3. Exercise three. (video) (midi)



4. Exercise four. (video) (midi)