You'll Hear It: Full Album Deep Dives with Jazz Musicians - 5 Ways to Use the Pentatonic Scale - #148

Episode Date: July 3, 2018

Today, Peter and Adam Demonstrate 5 uses of the Pentatonic scale. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

I'm Peter Martin. And I'm Adam Manus. This is the You'll Hear at podcast. Daily Jazz Advice coming at you. Pete, what are we got today? We're going to talk about five ways to use the pentatonic scale. Now, just five? Well, come on.

Penitonic, you know, pentagram. I got you. I got you. Wait until they hear our three best triads. And our one way to use a unison note in any situation. So, yeah, the pentatonic scale is used a lot. This is something that actually I'm hoping to learn a little bit of something, maybe from you. I don't have a lot to teach on this

but we're going to get a talk but I think the first thing I want to know is like what do you think of as the pentatonic scale? So I think of it, you know, if we're in the key of C I think of it starting on C. So C-D-E-G-A. Yeah, so 1, 2, 3, 5, 6. Yeah, basically.

Right. And yeah, I guess I always thought about that as a major as the major pentatonic scale. Okay, cool. But then the inversion of that, like if you start that on A, the same thing. Yeah, typically when, if someone were just to say

penitonic scale, I would go to that, although it's a minor pentatonic scale, for sure. Yeah. No, they're related. They're the same thing. It's a matter of where you're starting. And it's actually great to kind of hear that and understand that, no matter what instrument that you play, so that you can always, like if you learn to play something in terms of a melodic phrase, which is where it's at with this,

it's always about the horizontal, not about the vertical. Yeah. With these scales. And so when you learn to play a melodic shape or phrase, you want to be able to apply it to different situations. So the same ones that could work over this for A minor would work generally for C major. Well, and this brings us to number one, and that is the minor. I think this is probably, you know, as you think about it,

this is definitely the most used version of the pentatonic scale is on a minor seven chord. You know, let's say we're an F, F minor seven. I almost didn't play the pentatonic scale. So we have F, A, flat, B, F, C, E flat. Yeah. And I mean, this is so close

to the blues scale too which just has that extra. But it's really not. Without that flat five in there, it's a whole different sound. And I mean, I think the key with this, no matter where you're using this,

is like you said, it's not running these. I mean, that certainly is a sound. And as pianists, it's easy to run pentatonic scales down, especially, you know, just run your fingers. But, you know,

there are so many shapes that you can get out of these. That's why jazz musicians have found these to be so useful. Yeah, and I always think about... This is me about to play by the... Like the triads that you can find with the second. There's a lot of cool stuff in there. All those shapes, yeah, yeah.

All those shapes, yeah, you do a lot of... I mean, even just like skipping a note gives you these great sounds. So really experiment with all of these sounds that we're about to present. And those were good, too. Like play those, just play the same kind of things you're doing, but go to an A-flat in your bass. Oh, like a...

Yeah. That kind of thing? Yeah, I'm trying to lead us to number two. Yeah, well, that brings us to number two. So this same scale... You can use with the relative major chord. I mean, it's A-flat. Now, this is a very happy sound, right?

And this... You don't hear this... ton anymore. I love this sound. Yeah. Kind of major six nine sound. I think it's great. Yep. And I think the thing is too for everybody like if you shed on, you practice on these kinds of scales and sounds, you know, certainly if you're at the piano, you can go and play the bass note and move that around to hear how it sounds over that. If you're playing, you know, instrumentalist or singer, you're kind of imagining that root note. But the whole thing about this is you're not necessarily going to get in a situation where you get to an A-flab

major six, nine for four bars, and you would just play this. Because you might say, oh, that sounds boring. It sounds too plain. But you want to know this sound. You want to know what you can play so that when you make some melodic alterations and you leave the scale and you come back to it, it's that tension and release thing. You've got this as part of your tool belt. That's right. So in relation to like, you know, this major sound, which is, you know, one, two, three, five, six, something that jazz musicians used quite often is to. use the pentatonic scale from a fifth above.

Yeah. Right? So if we are, if we're going to stick with A flat major seven here, instead of using the A flat pentatonic, the one that we were just talking about, you can use... Because it doesn't include the major sevens. It does not include the major seven. If you want to get that tonality, you can use the E flat or the C minor. Yeah, it's funny because I was just thinking this C minor.

I mean, you hear this a lot like... It sounds really cool. Sounds cool if I play it, right? And there's probably like some, play the same chord down there. Like fourth, I see if these... But with triads as well. Yeah. That kind of a sound, which includes both that 6-9 and...

Yeah, they're all kinds of... And major 7 signs. All kinds of shapes for that. So that takes us to number four, and that is... That's the Lydian, right? Lydian. How do we build that? So we build that.

Let's stay with our E-flat major or C-minor pentatonic. We'll still be in the key of A-flat. This is built on the four-cord. A sharp-11 sound, right? So I have D-flat major-7-sharp-11, and I'm using that E-flat major pentatonic, the C-minor pentatonic. This is a great sound.

You can basically run interminor. urge with this sound. Even all the way through all those changes. Yeah, that's number four. Now, we're talking about a lot of different uses for these, but one of the cool things about pentatonic is this shape is so ingrained in us.

You know, as listeners and as people that it's one of the easiest ways to take things out. Yes. You know, and there's several different ways. We won't get into all the different ways, but... Because we've only got one left. We've only got number five left. If we had seven, Oh, man, we could go deep, we could go deep. But like, you know, let's go back to that, that A flat major 7, you know, with the E flat pentatonic.

The first thing you could do is just take this E flat pentatonic and do it a half step, either up or down. You know, if we do down, we get that great sound. Yeah. Sticky note, where we can start on the E flat pentatonic and then take it to the D pentatonic. Take it to the D penitonic. Take it to the day. And then go back to the E flat, you get this really hip sound. Very cool.

And I think you hit on a very important point there. When you just demonstrated that both times, you started at the E flat. Yeah. And then you went to the D and then you brought it back. And I think that's really a common and effective usage of this. It's like when you're going to use this chromaticism within the pentatonic scale, is to start home, leave. Yeah.

Go half step below, half step above. and then bring it back home. I mean, it's not the only way to do it, but it's a good way to get into it. It's a way to get into it. It works on the minor ones, too, for on the F minor with that A-flat pentatonic. Definitely just that brief moment of...

Yeah, kind of a little off-kilter harmonic stuff. So there you go. That's a lot of pentatonic. That's, you know, pentatonic scale. Love it, embrace it. Yeah. Or abandon it. Or abandon it.

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