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
Hi.
I’m not sure where you got the impression I advocate forgetting all about them. Maybe I’ve worded something badly and that’s led to the wrong interpretation. Either way it’s not my intention – the reason for showing the normal five positions is for reference, also I think that you “should” learn them – just not rely on them as the only way you think or visualise the scale across the neck.
Being fluent across the neck requires being able to see things throughout the fretboard that go beyond five fixed patterns. This requires being able to find the notes quickly anywhere on the fretboard, something I make a big point about.
Let’s say that you know the minor pentatonic box 1, you also know where the notes are on the thick string – easy enough, you want A minor pentatonic you start it at the fifth fret – you want C minor you start at the 8th fret – G at the third fret and so on. No problem but you are restricted to using the same pattern in no more than two locations on the fretboard, i.e., A at the 5th or the 17th fret. G at the 3rd or 15th fret etc.
This will force limitations on you and limit your ideas, it will also restrict you to one area at a time. The general way we are taught to play along the neck is with the five positions. The biggest problem here is … 1: this often leads to just switching back and forth between them … 2: being able to find them easily and quickly. Sure you could do this all in one key, shouldn’t take too long, but what happens when you are playing in a key that you haven’t practised much? You either jump to position 1 and stay there or you use a different position, but what do you use as your reference? If you only know the notes on the sixth string and you want to play position 3 in G minor then you’ll need to know which note it starts on for that key. Every time we change key, the sixth string starting note will be different for each position. This makes for a lot of memorising and a lot of hard work.
A far easier way to become fluent is to learn the notes on the fretboard. It takes time but it’s probably one of the best skills you could have. Once you can do this you start to think about scale notes based around the root notes on each string. This opens up a whole new way of thinking that will help you go way beyond one scale type.
When we learn to think in this way, what we are effectively doing is approaching scales from the inside and working outwards. Like I say, it takes some time but you only have to learn it once. From then on out everything about the guitar makes much more sense.
I’ve got nothing against the five positions, I still practise them myself sometimes but to become fluent we need to dig deeper. The aim of the book is to show examples of how to think differently by breaking the scales down into smaller chunks and them piecing them back together which will eventually give you an entirely different way of looking at the fretboard and give you a means of moving between positions horizontally, vertically, diagonally and partially which will give you complete freedom.
It’s probably one of those things that you don’t really get until you’ve stuck at it for a while – at which point you should be getting some light bulb moments.
If that’s of no help then come back and let me know, we can get more specific and try to solve the confusion.
Sorry but I thought your book was meant to show an easier way of learning the pentatonic but now you have to learn the shapes and your shapes too ! Two of my guitar playing friends took it that you definitely did mean in your book to disregard the five shapes as you say they are not the way to learn scales . I think your book should make it clear what you mean. But thank you for answering me I think I will just learn the five shapes though if you now are saying I should learn them
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.
