How To Play Major Pentatonic

I get this question from a lot of my students and it goes something like this, “How come playing major pentatonic is so much more difficult than minor pentatonic?”

So, on our journey towards learning how to solo I find that most of us start learning the minor pentatonic scale first. We spend hours and hours learning scale positions on top of trying to figure out how to land on the right notes when jamming at home or with our friends. After months of that and learning tons of minor blues licks, that day comes when the guy down the street wants to jam over a major progression and suddenly something isn’t right. Not only is the scale in a different spot, but you’re trying your best to use all your licks and none of them sound right. That’s because all the target notes are in a different spot of the scale in major pentatonic.

In the video below, I’ll help you remedy that and get you confidently jamming away again with your buddies down the street or jam tracks at home. We do this by learning how to see chord shapes within the scales. Those are the target notes! Once you can see the chords and their inversions inside your scale shapes playing major pentatonic or any mode for that matter, it will be much easier! Just a couple tweaks of your old riffs and you’ll be playing major pentatonic without much effort at all. I’ll give you the low down on how to do this in relation to our old friend the I, IV, V progression. It will show you how to see those chords inside the major pentatonic scale which in turn will show you how to find those illusive target notes you have been looking for.