Pentatonic Plus One Note: The 2nd and the Blues Note

The reason the minor pentatonic is the first scale everyone learns is that it cannot sound wrong. Take the two notes out of the natural minor that create tension and what is left fits over almost anything. That is also its limit: a scale with nothing that wants to resolve gives you nothing to resolve. Add one note back and the shape acquires a pull.

Which note you add changes what you get. Two are worth knowing.

Add the 2nd

Put the 2nd back into a minor pentatonic and you have six notes: the root, 2nd, minor 3rd, 4th, 5th and minor 7th. In D that is D, E, F, G, A and C. The E sits one step above the root and wants to fall onto it, which is the pull the five-note version does not have. The note it still leaves out is the 6th, and that is the one thing separating D Dorian from D natural minor, so the shape sits under either of them without asking you to handle seven notes.

Do the boring exercise first: find every E in the shape and play each one into the D above it and the D below it. Six notes is only useful if you can hear which one is the new one, and after a week of playing the shape as a run you will not be able to.

Add the blues note

The other addition is the flat 5, and it behaves completely differently. Where the 2nd is a note you can rest on, the blues note is a note you pass through. Sit on it and it sounds like a mistake. Walk from the 4th up to the 5th through it and it sounds like the entire history of the blues.

Which is why this exercise never lets you land on it. In G the blues note is D flat, and it appears here only between C and D:

If the blues note starts sounding wrong, you are holding it too long. That is the most useful mistake this exercise can produce, because it teaches the rule better than any explanation: duration is what makes a passing tone a passing tone. The blues guitar guide puts the same note to work over a full twelve-bar form.

One note is the right number

The temptation once this works is to add both, and then the 6th, and then a chromatic run, at which point you are playing seven or eight notes badly instead of five well. The value of a six-note shape is precisely that there is one new note in it and you know what that note does. Two additions and you are back to a scale where nothing stands out.

Add one, use it deliberately for a few weeks, and only then consider the other. If you want to know how the full seven-note versions behave, the modes course is the long way round and worth taking eventually.

Hearing it against chords

Both additions only make sense against harmony. Unaccompanied, a six note shape is just a shape. Over a chord, the added note is either creating tension against something or resolving into it, and that relationship is the whole reason to bother.

Both charts are Wisdom lessons in Guitar Quest, and after you can play them, put them over a jam track in the right key and listen specifically for the added note. If you cannot pick it out of your own playing, the shape has gone back to being five notes with a passenger.

Hearing whether the sixth note is doing anything is easier when something else is keeping score. Here is what that looks like:

Related reading

• Blues-Rock Pentatonic Phrasing: Motifs, Legato, and Space
• Guitar Scales for Beginners: The 5 Essential Shapes
• G Blues scale reference
• D Minor Pentatonic scale reference
• Modes course: Pentatonic and blues