Easy Way to Spice Up the Pentatonic

This video is gonna be something very easy that you can start doing right now today with your blues guitar playing. And it's a thing that is really simple to use. And I find myself using it every now and then, and I have to remind myself constantly to just do this. So here's the concept.

We're gonna take the minor pentatonic scale, all five positions. You can use any note that you want to, basically on, you know, basically any chord of the 12-bar blues. So I've got a backing track here. It's in the key of A, it's a 12-bar blues.

First, make it easy, first position minor pentatonic. You know, we got this thing. Everyone knows that. So we're gonna take every one of those notes.

And the only concept that you wanna know is that we're gonna slide into any one of those notes, a fret before it, anytime you feel like it. So instead of just playing, you could do this. See, I just take one note and I slide into it. You wanna make it a grace slide.

So we're not going. Cause then it's gonna give us some a little bit of more harmonic content. We're not actually gonna hear the pitch, but the inflection that gives you, makes for a great sound. And it just breaks up the monotony of, that type of a thing.

So I'm gonna play a track and just do a little bit and show you how you can use it very easily. Once again, key of A. If you're interested in getting a free course about blues improvising, where to start, where to begin with, click the link in the description and you can sign up completely for free for a 45 minute blues course, complete with a sound slice, interactive tabs, and backing tracks. Sound slide.

Get it? Delude it into a second position, minor pentatonic. Sled into the A note. Then I sled into the D note, with the E chord.

Pretty simple. Back to first position. Spot into E. Spot into D.

Spot into A. So that's another thing you do. In a previous video about your first step to improvising I talked about playing A, D, E. You got to memorize where those notes are at all over the fretboard and then when those notes are occurring in the chord progression you play that note.

Similar thing in this video if you know where those notes are at you can just slide into one. You know where our D note here, 7th fret of the G string. I just slid into D one fret before. Same thing with E.

E note here. You can add that note. And it just kind of makes for a little bit of a jazzy sound. You can of course then blend in bends, vibrato, runs and just add any position of the minor pentatonic area to it, you know.

On that I just added two notes together. It's not something that you want to do all of the time. I'm just doing it a lot because I'm trying to show the concept. But you want to kind of use it sparingly.

You know don't use it on every single lick. But when you do add it every now and then it just gives it another flavor and it's simple to implement. You know just click on the backing track and just start sliding into. I wouldn't worry about what note you're playing in the beginning.

Forget it. Almost every note in that minor pentatonic scale is going to sound halfway decent. Just play down the scale and slide all of them and just see how it sounds to you. So anyway, it's a very easy thing to do.

You can start doing a immediately. Like I said, don't do it all the time but kind of use it sparingly and it's just one of those little nuances that you can add to your playing that's just going to make it sound a little bit better and spice up the playing a little bit instead of just playing the same old straight down your scale. And then you want to blend it in with your vibrato, your bends, all the other nuances. All right.

See you next time.