Episode #230 Is Blues the Oldest Music in the World?!

Is the minor pentatonic scale over 3 thousand years old..... Probably not but today we are discussing the one scale to rule them all. We get into why the minor pentatonic scale is so heavily used for blues, where it comes from and what you should take from that. 

Should be a fun one!

Transcript

SPEAKER_01: 0:50

Hello and welcome to the Blues Guitar Show podcast with me Ben Martin, the podcast that brings you passion, practice and perseverance for your guitar playing journey. Each week we look at a different topic that affects our guitar playing all through the lens of playing the music you love which of course if you're in this area of the internet is the blues. Sometimes we're talking about scales, sometimes chords, sometimes whole songs, sometimes players, gear, everything else in between. Today we're going to break down one of the most fundamental concepts for playing blues guitar. This applies of course if you're You're playing acoustic and electric. I am, of course, talking about the minor pentatonic scale. This is the most heavily used scale in all of blues music and has been pretty much since its inception. We're going to talk about the origins of the scale, where it came from, why it's so heavily used and why that knowledge might be useful for you as a blues guitarist. So stick around. Let's get into the minor pentatonic scale. So let's start off by taking it way back and finding out where did this scale come from? Now, the kind of music theory answer to that is that, of course, the minor pentatonic scale comes from the minor scale. So our parent scale of the major and minor scales have different scale degrees, actually seven scale degrees in total. They are heptatonic scales. When we take out two of those scale degrees, we get a pentatonic scale. It's all based on the kind of Greek numbers, of course, five and seven. So if The kind of technical answer is that it comes from the minor scale. It comes from the natural minor scale. That's where our minor pentatonic comes from. Now, it also... interestingly, is a scale that has been heavily used in folk music worldwide. It's very, very prominent in African folk music, which is very likely how we kind of got the injection into the kind of rural blues roots of blues and rock and roll. But it also exists in traditional Chinese music. It exists in Scottish bagpipe music. It exists in some Middle Eastern music as well. Now, one of the interesting things about that is that there are certain scale degree movements that our brain is literally wired over generations and generations generations to hear and understand. One of them being the minor third down to the root. That would be our G down to E if we're playing an

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E.

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That movement has been seen in music for hundreds and hundreds of years, probably thousands of years. And so interestingly, even predating the kind of modern Western idea of uh of scales which largely comes from like middle europe and ancient greece even predating that it exists in one of the oldest pieces of music known to man commonly called the oldest piece of music hilariously named herrera and hymn number six which is Really weird if you think about it. How can the oldest piece of music in history be called number six? Surely there's a five, four, three, two and a one, but let's ignore that one for now. But that the Herarian hymn dates back to around 1400 BCE and comes from around about what would be kind of modern day Syria. and it was written on a stone tablet and it was written to be performed on a lyre which is l-y-r-e which is like a stringed instrument a kind of small handheld harp i actually had one of these a few years back um fun instrument to play but then you see really commonly used in ancient greece as well so you see in ancient greece and even roman empire kind of artifacts and stuff you see pictures of lyres on there some of these like interval movements date back basically as long as uh we have any knowledge of as long as we've been playing melodic music and that's one of the really interesting things because this this minor pentatonic scale is so music from the sort of 12th century. And so it's something that's existed for a long, long time, but it was very, very prominent in particularly West African folk music which is very likely how it got transferred of course as we all know over to the the us which is where we have the birth of birth of blues music so a kind of history of this stuff aside um why is it why is it so long standing and i think the answer is is twofold there's to me there's a kind of cultural answer and then there's a a technical music theory answer and we'll get into a little bit of playing to try and demo some of this um what i'm talking about as i go the kind of technical answer is that the minor pentatonic scale is the the e kind of one sentence answer to what can I play over what especially when we're talking about playing blues music so when we're talking about using chords that aren't explicitly major or minor so that would be your 5 chord that would be your dominant 7th chord the chords that we come across a lot in blues and rock music so you know you kind of if you have something you're right through to your 7th chord

UNKNOWN: 6:02

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01: 6:07

The answer to what can I play over that, because those chords are starting to get complicated, is the minor pentatonic scale will work over all of it. Now, one of the reasons I believe that it's so prominent in music, especially when we're learning to play stuff, is that you can use it over everything. It's a kind of big, broad paintbrush that you can paint over an entire solo in a key and there are no wrong notes. Effectively, by taking it from a heptatonic seven-note scale to a pentatonic five-note scale, we have eliminated the... notes that could cause us problems. Again, this is minor pentatonic, so this does not apply when we're talking about playing major songs in major keys. So to give you a demo of what this sounds like, I'm going to play a... very short 12 bar in the key of G using five chords. So that means just the root and the fifth, just this two note chord, power chords are often called as well. And I'm going to show you how it would sound if I played the minor pentatonic over it. And then we're going to get into the same thing with seventh chords. So check it out. This is just the five chord version first. Okay. And the same thing over seventh chords. Let's check out how that sounds.

UNKNOWN: 7:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 7:56

Okay, so hopefully you heard that and thought, yep, that makes sense. I've heard stuff like that before. You shouldn't have heard, touch wood, any wrong notes in there. Now, the interesting thing is when we get into this seventh chord thing. So let's think about what makes up our seventh chords. Again, this is why minor pentatonic for blues is such a fundamental thing to have an understanding of. So our seventh chords... Now, if you've been listening to me talk about triads for the last five years, you'll have a pretty solid understanding of this already. But seventh chords are built up of two things. They're built up of a major triad and a flat seven or a minor seven. OK, so if we do this in G, our triad, that's G, B, D. And then the seventh note. in the major scale, flattened, or the seventh note in the minor scale. So let's go for the minor scale. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, gives us an F, okay? So we put those two things together, we've got our G triad plus the F.

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We've got G,

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B, D, F. Now, if we played that again, and this time I'll talk you through how to play it, we're doing fret three on string six is our G, fret two on string five is our B, fret five on string five, D, down a string, fret three on string four, F. Cool. So if we think about this, we've got our minor. seventh there so we fly quickly through the minor scale this is going to help us understand so you're going to do g minus we've got g fret three on string six then we go fret five and fret six so that's g a b flat drop down a string same frets three five six we've got c d e flat drop down a string three five f back to g That's the natural minor scale. So what are the notes that we're eliminating when we're playing our minor pentatonic? Well, the first one we get rid of is that A, the second note, isn't it? Because we don't play that in our minor pentatonic. We just go straight from three to six. And then we play the four and the fifth, but we don't play the sixth. So we don't play fret six on the A strings. We don't play that E flat either. So we've got... That would be the minor scale. We'd take out the notes that we're not using... And then we're going to keep in both notes, the minor seventh and the octave. Now, why do we take out the second and the sixth? Well, it's because those notes become problematic. And one of the reasons that we can use the minor pentatonic over all of the chords is because it has none of the problematic notes. It roots us very heavily in the key that we're in, and we don't have any of those problem kind of clashes harmonically. Now, what I'm talking about is that, again, if we go back to our seventh chord, we've got this G, B, D. Now, what's difficult is if we're playing a chord that's got a B in it, sorry, a D in it, so that B, B, D, that fifth, and then you play a D sharp or an E flat, you get this, which we obviously don't want, so we just eliminate that note from the scale. Same kind of thing with our... That... that minor third down to root thing we were talking about if we include that minor second you could potentially fall into a place when you're improvising where you're playing a minor second over something that has a minor third in it so then you would get this clash here so we've got you get this sound which again we want to avoid so the reason that we use it so heavily is because for improvising it's like it's like a kind of answer to everything it's like in some sense never going to let us down um it's always going to work over all of those chords the other thing of course to point out is that we're not just talking about playing over the g seven chord tones we're also talking about playing over the c7 chord tones and the d7 chord tones so And the minor pentatonic in the root key works over all three of them. So that is why it's so, so heavily used. So it's a couple of different things. The technical kind of answer is that we can use it as a kind of big, broad... to improvise over whole songs and that's why it works so brilliantly like my kind of theory with it is I always use that that one scale to thread things together again we're talking about playing 12 bar blues specifically it's different and we're talking about playing country and stuff like that but when we're playing 12 bar blues I always use the minor pentatonic to thread things together because that's that's my safe place you know as they say nowadays um that's where I you know that's where everything works I know that there's going to be absolutely nothing uh harmonically dissonant And then I can start to create some of the dissonance by using notes outside of that scale to create a sense of feeling moving with the music or of creating some kind of awkward clash that I'm then going to resolve. You know, that kind of looping idea where you start on one note, go right to a kind of a kind of strange sounding note and return back to one of the minor pentatonic notes because we know they are going to feel like home and really root us in that home key. Now, the other side of this is the kind of cultural idea of why the minor pentatonic is so heavily used. And I believe it's because the minor pentatonic scale has become its own kind of language. And I think the fact that, you know, I listen to stuff like Albert King and he's sort of going... You know, I know he's just playing the minor pentatonic scale, but he's doing something different with it. You know, B.B.

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King...

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you know, you can start to recreate, like I can play a lick and you go, Oh, that sounds like that person. And I'm using the same five notes. And I think there's a sort of, there's an amazing thing that's happened with, with this one five note scale because of the such kind of strong influence of things like the early blues players is that I can play something that sounds like Robert Johnson. I can play something that sounds like Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy. And I, they're all using some version of the same scale, even right through to people like Kingfish. So it's become this kind of language unto itself. Like if I was playing a hip hop song, you know, if I was recording in the studio and I decided I needed a guitar solo and I went... Somebody would inevitably say, that's a blues solo. And I'm thinking, well, why do you think it's a blues solo? And it's something to do with this very specific sound that the Minor Pentatonic has that, as we know, dates back thousands of years, coupled with this idea that I am evoking this language, the language of the blues. The minor pentatonic really is the root of everything, I believe anyway. So where does this kind of leave us with what to work on with our guitar playing? Well, two things that I think are really worth making a point of. One, don't be scared to just get heavily into using the minor pentatonic scale. It's very easy to get bogged down in this idea that you need to have hundreds of different scales under your fingers. You need to be able to just pull modes out of your arse and everything like that. But really, it's so much can be it's one of those things where I think, yes, it's great to have all of these different musical theory concepts and modes and stuff in your arsenal. But sometimes there's really something to be said for just restricting yourself and going, I'm just going to do, I'm just going to do this. And this comes right back to something that is, I think, central to blues music, which is this idea of simplicity. You know, it's C6 Steve playing a two string guitar. It's Justin Johnson playing a one string, you know, guitar on a shovel. It's Diddley Bowes. It's Reverend Payton playing, you know, one or two string instruments. It's the idea that you know that if you really want to speak truth and have something creative coming out of you a really good route to get there is to be restrictive and I think that's the reason that you don't see a lot of blues players playing nine string guitars that and you know they look lame obviously So I hope that was useful. I hope that was interesting to you. Do work on your minor pentatonic playing. It's a fantastic thing to really get to grips with. It's something I'm forever listening to stuff and trying to learn things about. Top tip for you that I've picked up today, actually, is just listen to more Roy Buchanan. That's a top tip for today. I've been listening to him probably for all morning. And if you want to hear a master of the minor pentatonic scale, Roy Buchanan, you can't go far wrong with him. All right. Have a great week, everybody. And I'll catch you the same time next week.