How to Unlock the Major Pentatonic
Once you have gotten the minor pentatonic scale under your fingers and you’ve started using it, it’s time to think about the Major Pentatonic scale.
The Major Pentatonic scale, for many new players, always seems to be a bit of a bump in the road, but it doesn’t need to be. In this lesson you’re going to learn a simple method to approach this scale and learn a quick hack to play major key licks with ease.
Before you can construct a Major Pentatonic, you first need to learn where it comes from, which is the Major Scale. Here is the Major Scale in the key of A Major.
That is the first octave of the scale. We only need one octave for this. Now that we know the shape, we need to know the notes of the scale and give each one a number, known as an interval:
| I | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII |
| A | B | C# | D | E | F# | G# |
In the Minor Pentatonic lesson you constructed a Minor Pentaotnic scale by taking 5 notes from the Major scale and flattening some of them. For a Major Pentatonic, nothing needs to be flattened. A Major Pentatonic uses the intervals 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6.
The first shape of the Major Pentatonic, rooted from an A note is this:
You’ll probably recognise this as being the same as the second shape of the Minor Pentatonic.
A simple way to think about the Major Pentatonic is that it is the same 5 shapes, but everything is moved along one. So, that means if the first shape is the shape you previously recognized as the second, then this theory must apply to the remaining shapes.
Shape two of the Major Pentatonic:
Shape three of the Major Pentatonic:
Shape four of the Major Pentatonic:
Shape five of the Major Pentatonic:
If you want to get to grips with playing all your common minor key licks over a major progression, a simple and quick visualisation method you can use is to take the fifth shape of the Major Pentatonic (Which is the same form as the Minor first shape). You’ll notice in Major that the A is the second note of this. Use this as your anchor.
Check out the video on the Blackstar Youtube channel to see this quick tip explained in full detail along with the theory behind why it works.