in your book pentatonic scale fluency and your method involves ignoring the five box patterns but you show them at page 8 which will cause confusion ! Would it not have been better to say something like forget these ever existed and wipe them from your memory or something like that. With them being shown in the book you are showing something you are telling us to ignore and people may inadvertently try to memorise them
Date Swift
None of it is particularly easy, it all takes practice. This is about becoming fluent so that you can move around the fretboard with more freedom. Maybe I haven’t made it clear enough, I’ll have to read through the book to try to find where confusion is being created.
I’m not advising against learning the five positions, I’m advising against learning ONLY the five positions and leaving it at that. If I could choose only one method then I’d use mine because it covers everything. In reality the more you learn to look at things differently the more fluent you will become.
Learning the five positions alone will leave you restricted and your playing will likely end up just moving from one position to the next, to the next, back again and so on.
Breaking a scale down to smaller parts opens up a whole new way of thinking, not just for the minor pentatonic, it’s how you should view all scales. This isn’t my method, it’s not unique. Guitarists that can move around the fretboard with ease are not just thinking about fixed scale patterns. Sure they know them and use them but the thinking goes way beyond that. The problem is when playing a solo, you never know where you’re going to end up, but wherever it is you need to be landing in familiar territory so that you can quickly adapt. For example, let’s say I’m soloing in E minor pentatonic and I land somewhere on the 12th fret – the chances are pretty good that I know the 12th fret is E minor pentatonic position 1, no problem I’ve go somewhere to go. What if I’m on the G string, 7th fret? What position am I in and how quickly can I visualise the entire scale position around that area.
The point about knowing the root notes is you are never far away from one, so wherever you are on the neck you should be able to quickly find your way out and move back or forward into familiar territory, allowing you to transition smoothly from one area of the fretboard to another. If all you know are the fixed five patterns then you need to go work your way back where you just come from or start thinking about where you are, where the next position is and how you are going to get there. None of this is about easy so much as it’s about moving around fluently with confidence.
I’ll need to have a think about this and maybe write up a longer more detailed explanation.
