Cascading Pentatonic Runs: Descending Fours and Ascending Sixes

Most players learn the pentatonic box and then play it the only way they were shown: bottom to top, top to bottom. That is a scale, and it sounds like one. A sequence is what you get when you keep the same five notes and change the order they arrive in, and it is the cheapest upgrade available to a lead player. There is nothing new to learn under the fingers, and the line stops announcing that you are practising.

Both sequences below sit inside box shapes you already know. If the boxes are new, start there and come back. If you have never played one at all, the shape 1 lesson is the place to begin.

Descending fours

Number the notes of the box from the lowest to the highest. A descending four takes four notes downward, then jumps back up three and does it again. The hand keeps travelling down the neck while the phrase keeps resetting upward, and that tension between the two directions is what people mean by a cascade. It falls, but it never quite falls all the way.

Here it is in B minor pentatonic, index at the 7th fret and nothing moving for the first two bars. Play it slowly enough that you can hear four separate groups rather than a blur of notes:

The mistake almost everyone makes here is counting in eighth notes instead of counting the groups. Four notes fits neatly into two beats, so the sequence and the pulse line up and it is easy to lose your place without noticing. Say the group numbers out loud for the first few passes. If you cannot say them, you are not hearing them, and neither is anyone listening.

Ascending sixes

Six notes do not fit a bar of four. That is the entire reason to play them. Group the box in sixes and the first note of each group lands somewhere new every time, so the accent walks around the bar while the notes climb. Nothing about the scale has changed and the line stops sounding metronomic, because the shape of the phrase and the shape of the bar disagree.

This one is in C sharp minor pentatonic at the 9th fret, two notes to a string, strict alternate picking. Each group of six begins two notes above the last:

Play it flat and even before you try to shape it. Once the notes are reliable, put a small accent on the first note of each six and listen to where that accent lands: beat one, then beat four of the same bar, then beat three of the next, then beat two. Six eighth notes take three beats and the bar takes four, so the accent slides back a beat every time round. That is a three-against-four feel arriving for free out of a scale exercise, and it is worth far more to your playing than another ten beats per minute.

Making them even

Both sequences change string more often than a straight run does, and that is where they fall apart. Two things fix almost every case.

Keep the picking strict. Down on the beat, up on the offbeat, no exceptions, even when the string change makes it awkward. The awkward strokes are the ones worth drilling, and the alternate picking lesson has the drills for it. The moment you start choosing convenient strokes, the sequence starts leaning, and a leaning sequence is the thing a listener hears as sloppy.

Then work in short bursts. Four groups at a comfortable tempo teaches more than sixteen at a tempo where the last eight are guesses. Set a metronome at a speed where every note is clean, play four groups, stop, and check whether the last group was as good as the first. If it was not, the tempo is wrong regardless of how it felt.

Getting them into your playing

A sequence practised as an exercise stays an exercise. The way out is to stop playing the whole thing: take three notes off the front of a descending four and use them as a phrase, land on a chord tone, and leave a bar of silence. That is a lick. The full run is what you have in reserve when a solo needs to lift.

For the drilling part, Wisdom mode in Guitar Quest has both of these charts as lessons and listens to your actual guitar through the microphone, which is a less forgiving audience than your own ears at the end of a practice session. Playing them over a backing track is the other half: a sequence that sounds impressive alone and does not fit the chords underneath it has not learned anything yet.

Sequences are exactly the kind of thing that falls apart the moment something is listening. Here is what that looks like:

Related reading

• Wide-Interval Pentatonic: String Skipping and Spread Shapes
• Blues-Rock Pentatonic Phrasing: Motifs, Legato, and Space
• Lesson: Scale Sequences and String Skipping (With Tab)
• B Minor Pentatonic scale reference
• Guitar Speed Exercises: Daily Rhythm Guitar Workout