That’s a lot of information. Now what?

Now you have to practice.  

The advice you usually hear is to learn to play the pentatonic scales as scales. Start with C major pentatonic. Then G, F, D and so on like I outlined above.

Let me just confess I’ve been playing pentatonic and blues scales for a long time and I still know some keys a whole lot better than others.  I can do some fast and some not so fast.  I can do some up and down about the same and for some I’m much better on the way down.

I’ve notice many lousy pianists (like myself) will do some of them with two fingers.  For example, I play the C blues scale thumb on C, third finger on Eb, thumb on F, third finger on F#, thumb on G, third finger on Bb, thumb on C...   From what I can tell, this is pretty bad technique.  I should try to engage more of my hand.  I also note that I’m generally better going down the scales than up, which is probably something else I should be practicing to fix.

There are plenty of resources on the Web about pentatonic scales.  My favorite (probably because it’s so far out of my league) is Dick Hyman’s two minute lesson explaining Art Tatum’s use of descending pentatonic scales.  Hyman uses a three finger one octave fingering, where the thumb and second finger span the “skips” in the scale (e.g. for C major pentatonic ascending it’s thumb on e, second finger on g, and thumb on a, second finger on c, third finger on d).  There’s another guy on the web that’s come up with a two octave fingering that engages the entire hand.  It’s complicated, being different on the way up on the way down.  Note that what this guy calls the pentatonic is what I’m calling the minor pentatonic here.

I haven’t done the tedious work of writing out the pentatonic and blues scales in every key.  I’m sure you can look them up, but I think it’s better if you figure them out for yourself.  You can figure out the notes of any major pentatonic by adding the 2 to the major sixth chord.  Similarly, minor pentatonic starts from the minor seventh chord and adds in the fourth (and for the blues scale the tritone, aka sharp fourth or flatted fifth too).

I know the reason you quit piano lessons in the first place was that you hated playing scales. And here I am asking you to do it again.  It won’t be as bad as you remember.  There are only five different pitches in the basic scales.

Blame the piano.  If instead of five black keys and seven white pattern it just went white black white black you’d only need to learn things two ways to play in every key.

OK, I changed my mind.  Forget scales.  What you really need to know is for each inversion of each major and minor chord, where the extra notes of the pentatonic fall.  For C major inversions, learn where to find the D and the A, etc.  The pentatonic gives you a couple of notes to add to your triad when you know where to find them.

One thing I’m trying to work on is getting rid of the meandering quality of my pentatonic leads.  I have to remind myself to play phrases, rather than just a jumble of notes.  The easiest way I’ve found to practice this is to think of the vocal to a song I know, and just play pentatonic notes in the rhythm of the words.  This will naturally divide up a jumble of notes into hopefully meaningful phrases.


Next: Conclusion