How to Mix Minor and Major Pentatonic.

Hello everybody,

​on this lesson I’m going to show you How to Mix Minor and Major Pentatonic with a trick that you’ll find very interesting!

One of the most common questions about the pentatonic scale is how to mix the minor and major one.

Let’s start from a point:

1) Minor Pentatonic has a “darker” sound.

2) Major Pentatonic has a “brighter” sound.

This means that we could use them in different situations and different contexts. For example, Stevie Ray Vaughan loved to use the minor pentatonic mainly. And you can hear that kind of sound and what this means in his playing!! Instead, guys like B.B.King loved to use more the major pentatonic than the minor!

So, this could be a starting point to understand what to use and when.

But, if you’d like to use them in a more modern way and mix them, let’s think about the intervals we got again.

Minor Pentatonic: Root, m3rd, 4th, 5th, minor 7th.

Major Pentatonic: Root, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th.

So basically, if we played all the notes of the scales we would have a brand new scale: the Mixolydian scale. This scale will be presented in the Modes of Major Scale section later in this course.

In the meantime, here’re some tips you can use without using the whole scale:

1) Try to alternate min 3rd and maj 3rd.

2) Add the maj 6th and the min 7th in your licks. You can add the 9th too.

3) mix the min 3rd, maj 3rd and maj 6th.

Let me know if you enjoyed this lesson!

Leave comment below!

Have a great one,

Davide Pannozzo

PS: If you like to learn other tools and new scales to use on your improvisations take a look at my new course “Scale Concepts for Modern Blues Guitar”

https://corsi.davidepannozzo.com/products/scale-concepts-for-modern-blues-guitar/