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How To Play Pentatonic Chord Progressions On Guitar (it’s easy)

By Mike Hayes | July 7, 2010

Early in my teaching guitar career I started to notice unusual
but really cool sounding chord progressions that did not fit into
any traditional harmonic progression I had studied; as time when
by I became more and more intrigued by these ‘fringe dweller’
type progressions.

Since pre-historic times ever since the first men and women began
creating music human beings have always be trying to push the
harmonic boundaries; in fact the one constant reoccurring pattern
that can be found in the entire history of music is the human
intellect’s constant search for more complex harmonies.

Harmonies that sounded dissonant or odd fifty or twenty years ago
go totally unnoticed today, as the public hear these sounds more
often we accept them as part of the overall musical soundscape.

In the sixties musicians everywhere felt the need to break with
traditional harmonic progressions all field of music were
effected by the ‘new’ sounds.

Musicians such as Burt Bacharach working in the popular music
scene and Antonio Carlos Jobim composing Brazilian music were
just some of the new breed of writers continuing the quest for
new and interesting harmonic progressions that reflected the
social climate of the day.

Around 1957 the guitar grew in unprecedented popularity; of
course the guitar (both electric and acoustic versions) had been
a popular musical instrument for many years however, it was the
Beatles and early rock and roll that created the worldwide
explosion of popularity for the guitar; the guitar’s contribution
was a reemergence of folk music as well as the newfound
popularity of the minor pentatonic scale.

Chord progressions derived from the pentatonic scale were one of
the most significant musical breakthrough’s of 1960’s as
musicians searching for a way of breaking with traditional
harmony found the pentatonic progressions produced chords with
a new sense of harmonic freedom and that the pentatonic
progressions could also be integrated with traditional chords.

Pentatonic Chord Progressions overview:

Interesting and fresh sounding chord progression can be created
by using the notes of the minor pentatonic scale as root notes
for chords.

If we use the notes of an “E” minor pentatonic scale for our
example we would have the following notes.

E minor pentatonic: E – G – A – B – D – E

Using these notes as root notes we can create chord progressions
like these …

Ex 1.

Em /// | D /// | A /// | A /// |

Ex 2.

Em /// | D /// | Am /// | Am /// |

Ex 3.

E /// | D /// | A /// | A /// |

Notice how in these examples we can use major or minor chord
textures; the important point to remember is that we are using
notes from the minor pentatonic scale to function as root notes;
the type of chordal texture we use with this root note will
depend on the musical effect we are wanting to achieve.

Some more examples …

Ex 4.

E / G / | A / E / |E / G / | A / E / |

Ex 5.

E / G / | A / B / |E / G / | A / B / |

Ex 6.

E / D / | A / B / |E / D / | A / B / |

How do these chords compare with traditional harmonization of a
major scale?

Compare our ‘new’ pentatonic chord progressions with the triadic
version of the ‘E’ major scale.

E – F#m – G#m – A – B – C#m – D#dim – E

As you can see certain chords are found in both the pentatonic
and triadic progressions e.g., ‘E’; ‘A’ & ‘B’.

Which scale would we use to solo over the pentatonic chord
progressions?

The minor pentatonic scale will work well over all
the progressions regardless of whether the chords played in the
progression are major or minor; there’s something really
intriguing about minor scales being played over major chords, in
theory it should not work but in practice it produces a neat
blues effect.

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