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Visualizing Pentatonics - Line No. 1

Tom Quayle 164 lessons

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Now, on to line playing! All of these examples are TABBED for 4ths tuning but the standard tuned versions are at the end of the tutorial. I recommend you print these out for reference as some of the fingerings are different by necessity.

The great thing about pentatonic scales is that they don't contain any 'avoid' notes. A C major scale, being a seven note scale, has certain notes which, when played over certain chords in the key, tend to be heard as avoid notes. In other words, we'd rather not hear them over that particular chord. An example of this would be the note F over a Cmajor chord. Try it and see what you think!

The pentatonic scale doesn't contain any of these avoid notes and therefore, lines constructed with it sound great over any chord in the key.

The following four lines are all constructed and visualized using the sus chord technique we've looked at so far in a comping context. I'm primarily using Gsus4 and Asus4 as my source of material. Remember, we're using an Am pentatonic so our sus chords are built from the root and b7 of the scale.

I'll also be using some 3 note per string legato and position slides to connect the sus4 arpeggios together.

With this particular line, make note of when I do my position shifts from the video. Take these lines pretty slowly at first as they're all technically challenging.

On a final note, I use hybrid picking for all these examples but sweep picking would work just as well.

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