Finding Major And Minor Pentatonics From The Sixth String

Want that gritty, blues-soaked lead tone that just works over almost anything? We walk through the simple logic behind the pentatonic scale and show how one movable shape can unlock both minor bite and major sweetness without drowning you in theory. Starting from the sixth string as your map, we find the root note you need, drop the classic first-position box, and get practical with clear fingerings that help your hands memorize the pattern fast.

We dig into why minor pentatonic often sounds great over major chord progressions, the hallmark of blues and rock phrasing. Rather than memorizing dozens of scales, you’ll learn to trust a single pattern you can slide to any key—A today, G tomorrow—while keeping your focus on timing, bends, and tone. Along the way, we connect the dots between relative major and minor so you understand how one shape can serve two flavors depending on which notes you target and how you phrase your lines.

By the end, you’ll know the exact fret positions for A minor pentatonic, the one-four and one-three finger groupings to keep your technique clean, and the quick method for shifting the box anywhere on the neck. You’ll also hear why those “wrong” notes create the right kind of tension that defines rock and blues, plus simple phrasing moves—slides, bends, and call-and-response—to turn a scale into a melody. Grab your guitar, find your sixth-string root, and put these ideas to work on your next solo.

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Links:

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• Songs Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarSo... .

Chapters

• 1:11 Major And Minor Are Relatives
• 1:37 Why Minor Works Over Major
• 2:08 Building The A Minor Shape
• 3:05 Fingerings And Moving The Pattern

Transcript

Steve: 0:36

Okay, so if you know the notes on your sixth string, you can figure out where your major and minor pentatonics are by referencing the note that you want on the sixth string and then building the shape that you're looking for. So what I want to show you is how major and minor really are the same thing. We call it a relative major and minor, and I'm not going to go into a bunch of theory here in this video, but I do want to explain to you kind of how this works. So as rock guitar players, blues guitar players, that sort of thing, we play a lot in minor pentatonic. And it often happens, even if we're playing over a major chord progression, we might solo in minor, which doesn't really make any sense. But when you do it, it sounds like blues. It sounds like rock and roll. So knowing where minor pentatonic is is very important to learn how to solo. Again, even if you're playing in major keys, it happens quite frequently that we would solo minor over major. Now, again, there's reasons to all that we're not going to get into right now, but I want to show you this. So if you wanted to play minor pentatonic, penta being five, okay, very common scale that we use when we first start learning how to solo. And even advanced players use it. I could name you all sorts of guitar players that you know that use pentatonic all the time, okay? From rock to metal to blues to country to all sorts of different things. But here's the minor pentatonic uh scale, how it looks on the guitar in its first position or root position. So if I wanted to be in the key of A, for instance, whether the song's in A major or A minor or something, I wanted to play A minor pentatonic, I'm gonna go up to the note A. So I need to know the notes on the sixth string. That's very important. So I'm gonna go to A here. I'm gonna play 5, 8, 5, 7, 5, 7, 5, 7, 5, 8, 5, 8. Now, I would suggest using these fingers for now, but you can, you know, if you need to use something different, that's that's entirely up to you. There's lots of different ways we can approach these things, but this is a good place to start. So if you notice I'm playing first finger to fourth finger, and then I'm playing one three one three one three, and then one, four, one, four. So that's an easy way for you to remember that. One four, one, three, one, three, one, three, one, four, one, four. Because the beauty of this scale is you can move it wherever you want. If you want it to be in the key of G, you would simply find G and play exactly.