Learning and Utilizing the Pentatonic Scale (5 Tones)

     

Minor and Major Pentatonic scale positions.

     This week I have been playing on my bass guitar a little more. I picked it up to play to a song my drummer has been working on himself over in Florida where he's going to school for audio engineering and sound production. It's a pretty neat little groove that kind of drones on the guitar in a C-major chord and A-minor. It's just floating a lot back and forth and a driving industrial drumbeat and it gives it this melancholy but groovy feel. 

     At any rate, I wanted to come up with a punchy yet dancing harmony on the bass that could add some run-ups and run downs to the guitar part to make it more interesting and feel like it's walking up and down with his lyrics. So, I experimented a little bit with a preconceived bassline that I had already been working with but added some flare with the C-Maj and A-min pentatonic scales.

     What is the Pentatonic scale, you may ask? Well, it is simply a bass scale that incorporates 5 notes, or tones, hence the name pentatonic (5 tones).

 It really makes playing a bass line easier as in finding what works well or is pleasing to the ear with a certain chord that is being played by the guitarist. It also cuts out two other notes from the actual major scale, the 4th and the 7th notes in the major scale to be precise and leaves those five relatively easy to find notes for a pentatonic scale. Below is the actual C-Major scale and you can notice how there are 2 other notes in this scale. It is not to say that this is more difficult or less important, but it's kind of like a shortcut in a way around the fretboard to make a bass line that has some funky little notes in there.

C-Major Bass Scale

     The cool little trick I learned from this neat YouTube lesson was actually moving part of the scale up a fret on the same string you start on (in the case on the A string) and going to the 7th fret and then rocking up to the next string, the D, and then ending on the 5th fret on the G string. 

This is the modified way to play the Pentatonic Scale 

This is the actual Pentatonic Scale

    It seems like it is such an easy concept, but I actually had a lightbulb moment just by practicing these fundamentals. It opened my eyes to see how easily I can maneuver around the fretboard just by applying these little modifications, and just in the way I see it in my mind now. Take for instance, these 2 bass runs, utilizing the C-Maj Pentatonic Scale. 

    So, I ended up learning a great deal practicing on this lesson for about an hour, then plugged into my Tascam recorder and laid down a bassline to Kevin's song, "Without Hesitation", and he not only liked it he said he loved how I made a big dynamic change to the song overall with my bridge run-up! I have been just messing with this little lesson and putting my own noodling into the mix and finding all kinds of options! Hope this inspired you to pick your instrument up and start messing around, even if you don't really know what you're doing you are in fact still learning something each time you mess with it! If you're interested in learning more, you can watch the same video I did, below! Courtesy of Talking Bass - Online Bass Lessons channel on YouTube.