Now this is one topic that so many are so confused. I often hear so called musicians talk so much about this and the truth is, they really don't know what they are talking about. I even met a person once who pretended he wants to enroll at our music school but his true purpose was to test our capabilities as teachers. He claimed that he knows ALL of the pentatonic scales and other scales. At the back of my mind I was asking "then why enroll here?" then sometimes I would just love to think of pulling out a chair and slam it hard on his face. Just kidding! He did really get into my nerve.


Well, while he was playing there with his so called pentatonic scales, I asked him a simple question. WHAT MODE ARE YOU PLAYING YOUR PENTATONIC SCALE? He simply said, "I am playing a pentatonic scale." I made another inquiry, "What key are you on right now"? He insisted, "I am playing a pentatonic scale, it doesn't matter."


I couldn't take it any longer and simply said, "Sir, you have no idea what you are talking about just like a blind man giving directions to a stranger."


His words just gave him away, obviously he got himself embarassed and slowly walked out the front door.


Now I am not going to do that to any of you here right now, it was just an isolated case of being where your proper place should be. 


For this topic, I will only scratch the surface of the Pentatonic Scales and I will try to make another post later to let us dive deeper into this topic.




What is a Pentatonic Scale?


- as its name suggests, it is a five tone scale. "Penta" means five and "Tonic" means tone.

- this scale is derived from the major scale which has 7 unique pitches.

- there are other pentatonic scales which are unique to a certain culture, but within this topic we will discuss only the pentatonic scale of western music.




How do I construct a Pentatonic Scale?


Major Pentatonic Scales


Let us first remember how we construct our major scales. Our formula for constructing a major scale is WWHWWWH, W means whole and h means half. These series of whole and half steps forms our major scale given any note as our tonic or the first degree of our scale.

Now, to construct a pentatonic scale, we simply use the major scale except for the 4th degree and the 7th degree. We simply omit the 4th and 7th degree of a scale to form our Major Pentatonic.
























Listen to how a C Major Pentatonic Scale





There you go! That wasn't so hard after all! By playing the major scale without the 4th and 7th degree, you are actually playing a major pentatonic scale.

The pentatonic scale is also referred to as a gapped scale, one that contains more than a step between adjacent pitches.

We can also do some inversion of the given pentatonic scale above.









These modes above are just inversions of our major pentatonic scale, you play around them or transpose them depending on the need you have.

The following videos are samples of how you can use a pentatonic scale in a melody.






Minor Pentatonic Scale


- the minor pentatonic scale is a 5 note scale but this is one scale that we should be discussing further. For now let me just give you and example and later I will posting a whole new topic focusing specifically on this one.

This is the A minor pentatonic scale



I will discuss this further in a future post. This topic is a complicated one, for the meantime we will just scratch the surface and let us wait for the next post.