The Minor Pentatonic Scale, is a five note scale, derived from the Minor Scale. The minor pentatonic scale being a 5 note scale, utilizes the important notes of the minor scale. Those notes are the root, minor third, the perfect fourth and fifth, and the minor seventh. As you can imagine, using those very important chord tones, makes the Minor Pentatonic Scale an extremely versatile scale used in a lot of modern popular music.
Using those notes (root, m3, p4, p5, m7) to create the scale, means we need to pick a root note and find those intervals around it to create the scale. For example, using the A Minor Pentatonic Scale, if we list out all twelve notes we have:
A - A♯ - B - C - C♯ - D - D♯ - E - F - F♯ - G - G♯
If we follow a semitone pattern:
On guitar, we can also break the Minor Pentatonic Scale down into 5 positions which can be played anywhere on the fretboard. This can vastly simplify the scale, so it can be moved into any key by just moving the root of the scale position to the root you want the scale to be in. Check out the fretboard app to see if you can find how the positions all connect together.
