They become musically complex in how you use them. And when something is easy to play that doesn’t mean it’s not complex.Ī lot of Beatles songs are very complex and yet quite easy to play.Ī scale is only inherently so complex. As complex as any other scale.īut first off, complex does not mean good. So you use them and find your own way to be creative and expressive with them. If it’s cheating, what does it mean to win?Įverything is a tool you can use and how you use it to tell your story to your audience is where it really matters. Let me reiterate: just because a pattern is easy to play, does not make it bad. If any tool in your repertoire gets you to the place you want to get and allows you to communicate the story or emotion you want to communicate, it’s not cheating. People really do talk about the pentatonic scale like it’s cheating. I’m not saying that it’s better than anything else. So western audiences have been exposed to melodies, lines and riffs built on the pentatonic scale quite heavily. Especially in the late 19th century when impressionist composers used it for it’s natural/improvisational sound. A lot of this has to do with the wide-spreading influence of blues and rock and roll.īut even without the blues, you find pentatonic scales all over western classical music. In the world of modern popular music, pentatonic scales have become favorable to many audiences. But like any art, music becomes less subjective when you have a target audience. It’s the same as a normal scale, missing 2 steps, but if you purposefully avoid those 2 steps, it changes the vibe. The lines feel like the ups and downs of a voice in conversation. And to modern audiences it sounds very natural. When you play lines and improvise on this pattern of notes and leave out those 2 extra notes, you get lines without half steps. Why is it that way? Maybe someone can share. Play a minor scale, take away the 2 and 6, and you got a pentatonic scale. Play a major scale, take away the 4 and 7, and you got a pentatonic scale. Really the pentatonic scale is a five note scale. But just because a pattern is easy to play does not make it bad. Like the patterns feel much more symmetrical than full scales. And the patterns you get out of them happen to be pretty easy to memorize on the fretboard. There are no half-steps in a pentatonic scale. On a guitar, it does not require as much dexterity as a full scale. I think a source of this problem is that a lot of guitarists think of the pentatonic scale as the easy scale. You never hear pros say this stuff though. We also hear them say famous guitarists are overrated because “all they use are pentatonic scales.” I’ve heard so many beginner to intermediate guitarists talk about it like it’s bad, it’s cheating, or implying that it’s not complex enough. And this is very weird because no other instrumentalists seem to share it. A lot of guitarists seem to have some sort of stigma about the pentatonic scale.
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