Advanced Lesson
AND FINALLY...
|n this month's lesson, I want to take a different look at the pentatonic scale and break it down in a way that might help you better understand some of the common phrases and exercises associated with this scale. Using this breakdown, we'll go through some beautiful melodic phrases and patterns that will definitely help to expand your vocabulary. So grab your bass, and let's begin!
We'll focus on the G minor pentatonic scale and the B flat major pentatonic scale for this lesson. Why? Well, because they're the same scale. B, is the relative major of G minor. Here's a very simple
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Rich Brown guides us to Advanced level every month. Read on as he takes us to the very top of bass theory!
way to think about this. Whenever you play a minor pentatonic scale, the relative major scale is found on the second of that minor pentatonic.
The second note of the G minor pentatonic scale is B. Playing the major pentatonic scale from that second note will give you the relative major.
any confusion, the bottom pair of each grouping will contain the lowest notes. Now that the pairs have been established, we can put them to work.
I've talked a bit about this in a previous lesson, so I won't go into too much detail here: Let's get into the breakdown. Have a look at Exercise 1.
gives us four notes below the dividing line (G, C, F, and B flat on the 3rd fret) and four above the dividing line (B flat on the 6th fret, and D, G, and C on the 5th fret).
For the next step, we can look at each of these four-note groupings and break them down into three separate note pairs, as illustrated in the next exercise.
EXERCISE 1
These examples show a different breakdown of the major and minor pentatonic scales. Think about this as a way of dividing each scale in half: In the case of G minor pentatonic, you can think of the 4th fret as a dividing line. This line
We can now easily surmize that each pentatonic scale contains six different note pairs in total, and if we look at Exercises 3 and 4, we can play these pairs in order, starting from each degree of the scale. This pattern might already sound
Each grouping contains a top pair, then a middle pair and a bottom pair. To avoid