Guitar Hacks: The Pentatonic Handbook

Five notes. Eleven lessons on getting more out of them.

The minor pentatonic is the first scale most guitarists learn, and for a lot of us it's still the one we're playing twenty years later. The usual advice at that point is to break out of the boxes — learn more scales, more shapes, more notes.

I think that's the wrong direction. The scale has five notes in it. Playing those same five notes somewhere else on the neck varies your licks a little and leaves you feeling just as boxed in. The answer isn't more notes. It's doing more with the ones you already have.

That's what this book is for. Eleven lessons, each one a different way of getting something new out of a scale you know inside out:

• Moving everything you can already play in box 1 into the other four boxes
• Isolating three or four notes and refusing to play anything else
• Building the scale up from a triad so it comes out melodic instead of run through
• Playing minor pentatonic over major and major 7 chords, and why it works
• Getting modal sounds without abandoning pentatonics for CAGED or 3NPS shapes
• Building your own five-note scales out of the modes, melodic minor and harmonic minor
• Playing outside the key, and finding your way back in
• Every diagram is labelled with intervals rather than note names, so the shapes move to any key rather than working in one.

If you know the five boxes and suspect there's more there than you're getting, this is the book.