Pentatonic Shapes You Don't Care About

everybody knows the standard minor pentatonic shape that our first teachers make us fiddle around with to a half forced, fully generic blues progression...

while this scale is fantastic (and necessary!), sooner or later the shape of the 'box' becomes a little bit stale. how many times can you rocket up and down the same shape before you start to yearn for more?

well, you're in luck. just like the modes of the major scale, we can alter the appearance of this humble shape by using a different note at a starting point, and building a position-based scale from there in a different area of the neck.

let's begin by moving up one note from where we left off on the original minor pentatonic scale. yes, we are staying in A minor penta, so now our shape will begin with a C note...

notice i am still labeling the root notes of A minor pentatonic, even though they are no longer at the beginning of the scale shape. what we have here is the Major Pentatonic scale - and if you are used to playing the diatonic major scale in position, you will notice it is very similar, minus 2 notes per octave. yes, you can use this over any ionian-based progression. if you were to do so, however, your root note in this particular key would shift over to C.

the remaining 3 pentatonic shapes are shown below. they unfortunately go by many names, so i will simply omit any labeling for simplicity. for reference, most people prefer to simply number them from 1-5.

please note the fretboard positions - the first 2 patterns shown have diagrams that run from frets 5-19, instead of 1-12.

once again, i've kept the minor-based root notes in bold. if you were playing a major based-progression, you'd shift to C in this key.

you may notice that while the patterns share the same notes, they also share 'ends' with each other. for example, the notes that end the A minor pentatonic shape are exactly the same as the note that begin the C major pentatonic shape, position-wise. see them? if you can visualize adjacent patterns while you are playing another shape you'll be able to borrow notes from them, which will only expand your 'box,' and your playing overall.

here's what all of them look like laid out on the fretboard at once. note the colors of each note to visualize the shapes, and to see where they intersect with each other...

this fretboard diagram runs from fret 3-17

this chart should get the point across - pentatonics are very powerful and useful! combine this technique with the the use of superimposition and you have an insane array of options without ever leaving the key!