HOW TO USE The Minor Pentatonic Scale on the Guitar

Hey, guitar enthusiasts, Lauren Bateman here. In this lesson video, I'm going to show you how to use your minor pentatonic scale and move it all around the fretboard, depending on what song you're playing. So let's get into it.

Now. Hopefully you guys watched my previous video on the A minor pentatonic scale. What that is how to find that shape. If not, I'll put the video up here. You guys can go check that out and then come on back here. What we're going to do in this video is I'm going to show you how to move that shape. So we went over the position one shape of the pentatonic scale, and I'm going to show you how you can move that all over the fretboard of the guitar, depending on what song you're playing. So in that last video, I just showed you a minor pentatonic.

And I told you how a song like Led Zeppelin, Stairway to Heaven uses this pattern quite often in that song. And he uses. They use other positions of the pentatonic scale as well. But the majority of that song is a minor pentatonic. Why is that? Because the song is written in. In a very specific key. Particularly that key is A minor, or what we call C major. This is kind of like a relative major minor thing. It's a little bit of music theory that you guys need to understand. But if you know what key the song is in, you can play these scales and move them anywhere. Now, how do I figure out, Lauren, the song's in C major. How do I know what the minor key is? Well, I'm going to give you a little tip. So if you have a song like Stairway to Heaven, that's in the key of C major, okay? Key of C major, you would find the C note on the top string of the guitar, which on this guitar and all guitars, if you're tuned to standard tuning, is the eighth fret of the top string. Okay? If you count back three frets. 7, 6, 5. This note is a. You can play an A minor pentatonic scale. Okay? So that's how you pair these things up. And notice this, the pinky is touching the C. So if you're in C major, count back three notes and you'll end up on A. And your scale will be perfectly positioned to play over that song. Say you have a song, Sweet Alma, Alabama. Okay, I think that one's in G, which means it would be an E minor pentatonic. Okay, how do I know that? Well, G is the third Fret on the top string and I count back three frets. Well, the third fret back is the open strings, and that's why a lot of these, you know, a lot of their licks and stuff are on this open thing. It's. It's pretty cool. You can go check out my Sweet Home Alabama lesson if you want to. I don't show you all the licks, but I do show you some cool stuff in that. So that is E minor pentatonic. Now, if I were going to play the scale, we have to contend with the open string. So instead of using our first finger, we would be playing open 3, open 2, open 2, open 2, Open 3, open 3. So be.

A lot of songs. You probably heard that last bit. So I kind of sound like Comfortably Numb, huh? Comfortably Numb, also in the key of G, uses the E minor pentatonic for a lot of its licks. Hey, guys, I hope you're enjoying this lesson so far. Don't forget to subscribe and turn on your notifications this way. YouTube lets you know when I release more videos just like this one. So essentially what you're going to do is you got to find out what key the song is. And you can either look that up yourself or you can use what I call the odd man out method. So the augment out method works probably 90% of the time. And it's. You take the three major chords that you find in a song. So say, for example, let's take Sweet Home Alabama. Okay, the chords of that song are G, C, and D. Now, two of those letters come together in the Alphabet. Okay? C is right next to D in the Alphabet. To get to G, you kind of got to jump over a few other letters to get there. So G, I call that the odd man out, which means that the song is in the key of G. Meaning you would play an E minor pentatonic. So you'd find your G note, count back three strings, and you would be an E minor pentatonic. Let's take a song like Stand By Me. Okay, the chords in Stand By Me are A, D, E, and F sharp minor. So we're gonna ignore the F sharp minor, but that is the key. That's the minor. But ignore that for now. Let's just take A, D and E. Okay? And we have A. We have D and E. Well, D and E come next to each other in the musical Alphabet, which means A is the odd man out. So we're going to find our A note on the top string. Okay? A is the fifth Fret on the top string and we're going to count back three frets.

We end up at F sharp. So this is an F sharp.

Minor pentatonic scale. Okay, so, so this is how. So you know that now you can go listen to Stand By Me. And if you want to play your own solo over it, you can. So that is how we take this first position of the pentatonic scale. And we can just move it all along the guitar to find the place that we need to for the songs that we want to play solos over. Or the easiest thing on YouTube is just to go and look up a backing track and find one that is in the key that you want. And hey guys, hope you enjoyed this lesson. If you want to learn more about lead guitar scales, bends, slides, I have a nice little mini course, lead guitar 101, that has a bunch of little exercises to help you guys out and get you started with the pentatonic scale. Has some cool PDFs and printouts that you guys can get too. I'll put a link in the description below for you guys to go check that out. YouTube's going to pop up a couple more videos over here. Go check those out. And I hope to see you guys in an off the lesson video very soon.