How To Make Your Pentatonic Scale More Interesting

Hey, guitar enthusiasts, welcome back. Lauren Bateman. Here. In this lesson, I'm going to show you a little addition that you can add to your pentatonic scale to make it sound a little bit cooler.

So if you see my earlier videos on the a minor pentatonic scale or the position one of the pentatonic scale, you'll know that I showed you basically the first shape of the scale. Okay. Sounds like this.

If you didn't see that video, you can go check that out up here, then come back here, because I'm going to show you now a little addition you can put on this to make your guitar solos sound much better instead of you just playing up and down one single scale position. So I'm going to show you in this video is the addition of the second position, the bottom half of the second position. Now, the pentatonic scale is just like a jigsaw puzzle. There's actually five positions, and like a jigsaw puzzle, they overlap each other. So what do I mean by that? So let's take that. A minor pentatonic scale, and we had 5, 8, 5, 7. Right. Well, the second position starts 8, 10, 7, 10. Okay, so they're overlapping. They shear that middle note. So once again, the first position. Five, eight. Second position, eight, ten. First position, Five, seven. Second position, seven, ten. Okay, third position. Five, seven, seven. Oh, seven, ten again. Okay, then five, seven, seven, nine, five, eight, eight, ten. Five, eight, eight, ten. All right, so second position is eight, ten, seven, ten, seven, ten, five, nine, eight, ten, eight, ten. So that's the entire position. What I'm gonna have you do is add on just the bottom.

Three strings to your scale. So that would be the ninth fret.

On the G string. And then 8, 10 on the B string. 8, 10 on the G string, E string. And what does that allow you to do? It allows you to get, you know, some extra range out of your playing. They call this BB's box. I guess BB King used to.

Used to play there a lot. But it's really cool because, you know, if you have an electric guitar, it's easier to do the bends and stuff and do some cool stuff. I probably should have grabbed the electric guitar for this one, but that's okay. I have the acoustic in my hand, so, you know, you can do a lot of bends and stuff and add to your guitar playing. Hey, guys, hope you're enjoying this lesson so far. Make sure to hit the subscribe button. Turn on those notifications this way. YouTube will show you more videos just like this one. All right. Fine. You guys are yelling at me all the time to get the Gretsch off the wall. So the Gretch is off the wall. The Gretch is down here. This is my George Harrison model Gretsch. Now, I will be the first person to admit I am not the greatest lead guitar player. I mostly played rhythm guitar in my band. But I do know how to play lead guitar. So don't feel like you have to be an amazingly guitar player to. To sound good. Okay, so what we're going to do here, I just want what you can do. What this has opened up for you now. So if we start at the fifth fret of the D string.

What you can do now is this opens an opportunity for you to slide up to the ninth fret.

And access the bottom half of that second position. So remember, the bottom half of the second position is ninth fret on the G string. 8:10. 8:10 on the bottom two strings. So we've got.

Okay, so you can hear. I now have the opportunity to bend on this.

10Th fret. And we're trying to bend up to that 12th fret note.

Okay, again, if we go back to stereoto heaven, because I know that's a great example of A minor pentatonic. They do that a lot. There's a section of the song.

Where they come up to this. I can't remember it off the top of my head. But also now you've opened up. I really like that slide going from 5, 7 on the G string and then coming right up.

To the ninth fret. You can either slide right into it or you can go V7, hit that note again and then slide.

Okay. Either way.

Both sound really cool. So instead of just going.

Okay with your. With your A minor pentatonic scale, now you can kind of start in the middle.

You can go into it and out. It gives you an extra note on that string.

Okay. So you can go into it and come down that bend. That 10th fret is a killer bend. There's a lot of emotion in that. So you can work on that. And it's a much easier bend too, because you're just bending to that 12th fret. So it gives you extra notes. So you can just hang out in this box too.

See what you can get out of just five notes.

Okay. You can do a lot with. With just five notes. And I think a lot of thing, and I experienced this too, as someone coming from rhythm guitar learning electric guitar is you get scared of how things are going to sound and you think you're gonna sound stupid. Well, I'm in my studio by myself here. No one is gonna hear me but me. So try things. Make mistakes. I make mistakes all the time. But I highly recommend that you start exploring what more of your instrument. Add the bottom half of the second position of the pentatonic scale, pull up a backing track and just go for it. There's going to be things you do that you like, alright? And you're going to do them more. And there's going to be things you do and you're like, that did not work. I hate that. I totally failed on that. You can either try doing it again to make it better or you can just say, I'm not going to do that. Alright? So that's what I want you guys to focus on is on these bottom three strings, you know, sliding into that next note.

You can just slide up.

Okay? That's all I want you to do is just explore with an additional five notes. But it makes your pentatonic scale in your playing sound so much cooler because you've got this extra octave up here that makes things.

That you can add to. Okay? So it sounds really cool. Give that a try. I hope you guys enjoyed this lesson. Make sure to give me a thumbs up if you, if you did. YouTube's gonna pop up a couple more videos over there. Go check those out and I'll see you guys in another lesson video very soon.