TABLE OF CONTENTS (Click to jump) |
Greetings, everyone! Rodrigo here again!
In today’s article, I want to go beyond the typical music website lessons. Sure, we’ll cover the usual scale diagrams, but more importantly, I’m going to show you how to actually sound good while improvising with the F minor pentatonic scale.
If you’re new to the blog and don’t have much background in music theory, don’t worry! I’ve written a series of 16 articles that cover everything you need—from basic intervals to arpeggios, scales, major and minor keys, and how to create chord progressions (a must for songwriters and composers). You can catch up on those posts by clicking their titles below.
Now, I mention this because understanding today’s content really depends on knowing the basics—intervals, how scales are formed, and the relationship between chords. If you’re not quite there yet, take a look at those posts. I promise they’ll give you the foundation to understand absolutely anything in music.
To my regular readers—thank you so much for the continued support! As always, new articles are coming your way every month, and I’ve got some exciting updates for the store soon. If you haven’t already, bookmark the blog, and feel free to drop a comment below with any topics you’d like me to cover.
Thank you all!
Rodrigo
Simples Intervals -> Compound Intervals -> Triads -> Drop-2 Chords -> Drop-3 Chords -> Shell Chords & Extensions -> Triads & Extensions -> Chord Melody -> Guitar Arpeggios -> Guitar Scales -> Major Keys -> Minor Keys -> Harmonic Minor Keys -> Melodic Minor Keys -> Greek Modes -> Chord Progressions
F MINOR PENTATONIC (SCALE FORMULA & POSITIONS)
Before we begin, let’s clarify a few points. A pentatonic scale is any scale made up of five different notes, while a minor scale includes a minor third as its third degree. This means there are many different scales that could be called "minor pentatonic." However, the most commonly known and widely used version—the one we’ll focus on in this article—is often referred to as the "minor 7th pentatonic."
The formula for the F minor pentatonic scale is:
1 b3 4 5 b7
Where:
"1" refers to the root note, F
"b3" refers to the minor third, Ab
"4" refers to the perfect fourth, Bb
"5" refers to the perfect fifth, C
"b7" refers to the minor seventh, Eb
The notes in the F minor pentatonic scale are:
F Ab Bb C Eb
Each of these notes forms a different position or starting point on the fretboard when playing the F minor pentatonic scale. Take your time to memorize all five positions. Once you master these shapes, you'll be able to apply them to any key, making them a valuable skill to have.
The black circles on the left represent the guitar strings.
The numbers under the fretboard indicate the fret numbers.
The red circles represent the root note (F in this case), while the blue circles represent the other four notes of the scale.
Start the following shape with your index finger.
Start the following shape with your middle finger.
Start the following shape with your middle finger.
Start the following shape with your index finger.
Start the following shape with your middle finger.
Make sure you've memorized all five positions before moving on to the next topic. Take as much time as necessary to master them.
And if you don't understand scale formulas, please read my articles on simple intervals and guitar scales.
HOW TO PRACTICE EFFECTIVELY
You should practice these exercises until you can play them effortlessly from start to finish without any mistakes. Think of them like a piece you’re getting ready to perform for an audience—rehearse them every day until you achieve near perfection. Honestly, that’s how everything in music should be approached!
These exercises might not feel intuitive at first because their connection to music isn’t immediately obvious. That’s why it’s so important to practice them daily—just like athletes working on their fundamentals. Over time, you’ll start to connect all the shapes with ease, quickly transpose to other keys, and this newfound freedom will show in your solos. Once you've mastered this part, you can shift your focus entirely to the melody and ideas in your solo.
Exercise 01:
The following exercise connects all the F minor pentatonic shapes you've been practicing. The red arrow represents the shape starting from the root (F), the blue arrow represents the shape starting from the b3rd (Ab), the green arrow represents the shape starting from the 4th (Bb), the pink arrow represents the shape starting from the 5th (C), and the orange arrow represents the shape starting from the b7th (Eb).
Exercise 02:
This next exercise is essentially Exercise 01 played in reverse. However, notice that the shapes previously connected through the first string (high e string) are now connected through the sixth string (low E string), and vice versa.
Exercise 03:
The following exercise is more important than it might seem. Being able to play the F minor pentatonic scale on a single string is key to freely moving across the fretboard during your solos. Sticking to just one shape can make your solo melodies feel limited and repetitive. To create more interesting solos, it’s important to shift between low and high notes, adding variety and depth to your melody.
The key to practicing the following exercise is not just memorizing where the notes of the scale are, but also knowing which scale degree you're playing and the interval between them. This understanding is crucial for easily transposing shapes to other keys. Practice the exercise both forward and backward, naming the scale degree you're on and identifying the interval to the next note.
Exercise 04:
The next step is to play each of the "vertical" shapes, and when you reach the first string, continue up the scale to the highest note possible on your guitar’s fretboard. In this exercise, you’ll start from the root (F) and play through the F minor pentatonic scale until you reach the highest note on the first string, which is C.
Practice this with all five vertical shapes, always ending on the highest C on the first string. Use your understanding of intervals to guide you once you reach the first string.
Exercise 05:
The following exercise is Exercise 04 played in reverse. Remember, we need to cover the full range of the fretboard. To demonstrate, I used the shape starting from the 4th (Bb) one octave higher. Once I reached the first string, I continued playing the F minor pentatonic scale, following the intervals down to the lowest note on that string.
As with the previous exercise, practice this with all five vertical shapes too.
Too much? Get ready for a lot more!
HOW TO ACTUALLY SOUND GOOD
Roughly speaking, creativity comes from the same place as hard work. Creative people are the ones who are constantly trying to do things that everybody does, but in a different way, whether they admit it or not. Fortunately, nowadays we have techniques to help you expand your vocabulary in any musical aspect, but you still have to try it over and over until you get the hang of it. As one of my favorite teachers used to tell me "You have to sound bad before you can sound good." Here are the techniques:
Exercise 01: Patterns
The image below illustrates how many people practice scales, such as the F minor pentatonic scale—by playing each note in sequence, without any skips or changes in direction. While this approach is a great starting point for memorizing the note positions and mapping the scale across the fretboard, it can become limiting if it's the only way you practice. Repeating the same pattern over and over makes it a part of your musical vocabulary. The same principle applies to language: the words we use daily shape our ideas and perspectives, just as our musical vocabulary shapes our creativity. Our thinking can only be as expansive as the words—and notes—we choose to explore.
And in standard music notation and TABS, it would look like this:
The following example is from Jerry Bergonzi's book Inside Improvisation Series, Vol. 2: Pentatonics. I'll first explain the concept, then show you how to create your own patterns. There are two key terms to keep in mind: 'skip,' which means you'll skip the next note in the scale (either ascending or descending), and 'step,' which means you'll play the note immediately adjacent to the one you just played (up or down the scale).
For instance, the image below follows this pattern:
Skip (up), Step (up), Skip (down), Step (up)
Starting the scale on F, we skip up to Bb, step up to C, skip down to Ab, and step up to Bb. From there, we repeat this same pattern until we reach the last note of the vertical shape. By applying this sequence across the entire shape, beginning from the root (F), you'll discover a new way to practice the scale.
To create your own patterns, simply choose a sequence of skips and steps. A good rule of thumb is to limit yourself to 2 skips and 2 steps (no more than 4 intervals). You can change the order and direction as you like but be sure to try and select patterns that sound good to your personal taste.
Depending on the sequence of intervals you choose, the resulting pattern might be either ascending or descending!
Exercise 02: Connecting chords
To make your solo stand out, focus on emphasizing the chord tones—the notes that make up each chord. Even when using a scale with only five notes, some of these notes will align with the chord progression you're soloing over. Let's illustrate this with an example.
Consider a typical minor chord progression in the key of C minor:
Fm7 | Abmaj7 | Bbm7 | Cm7
The notes for each chord are as follows:
Fm7 = F, Ab, C, Eb
Abmaj7 = Ab, C, Eb, G
Bbm7 = Bb, Db, F, Ab
Cm7 = C, Eb, G, Bb
The F minor pentatonic scale includes all the notes of Fm7. This means when soloing over the Fm7 chord, emphasize these notes.
For Abmaj7, the F minor pentatonic scale includes Ab, C, and Eb, so these notes can be emphasized during your solo over Abmaj7.
Similarly, over Bbm7, emphasize Bb, F, and Ab from the F minor pentatonic scale.
And over Cm7, emphasize C, Eb, and Bb from the same scale.
To effectively emphasize these chord tones, play them on the downbeats. This will highlight the essential notes of each chord, while notes played on the upbeats will act as passing tones. Below is an exercise that uses only eight notes, splitting each beat into two notes—one on the downbeat and one on the upbeat. The arrows indicate the downbeats of each bar, and the colors illustrate different chord tones for each chord.
In this exercise, I've used a vertical pattern of the F minor pentatonic scale starting from the 5th degree (C). You may notice that certain notes have been reordered to match the downbeats. While having chord tones on the upbeats is acceptable, avoid placing tensions (notes that do not belong to the chords) on the downbeats.
Another key to sounding great is to emphasize the transitions between chords by highlighting the chord tones of both chords.
The following image uses the same example as above, but I want to explain how it works and why one transition isn’t as smooth as the others. In the Fm7 bar, the last note we play is F, the root of Fm7, which connects directly to Ab, the root of the following chord, Abmaj7. This creates a smooth and effective transition. From Abmaj7 to Bbm7, we play Eb (the 5th of Abmaj7) followed by F (the 5th of Bbm7), which also works well.
It's important to note that transitions don’t have to occur between the same degrees of each chord—this is just a coincidence in these cases.
However, from Bbm7 to Cm7, we play Eb (the 4th of Bbm7, which is not a chord tone) and C (the root of Cm7). Although this still works because we’re emphasizing the chord tones, it’s not the smoothest transition. This happened because we are limited to just eight notes. To improve this, we could easily adjust the rhythmic pattern to include more notes before landing on C.
This concept will be explored further in the next exercise.
Before moving on to Exercise 03, make sure you fully understand this concept. It’s important for you to create your own exercises. The more exercises you write, the more pathways you'll discover to connect chords, and the more skilled you'll become at improving your solos with the pentatonic scale. In the example above, I used one vertical shape across all four chords, but you should explore the other four shapes as well. Don’t limit yourself to just one exercise per shape—you can create dozens of different lines using these ideas.
You can also mix these concepts with patterns you’ve already created or even try playing them on a single string to navigate the entire fretboard. The possibilities are endless—that’s the essence of creativity! There will be times when you’re not satisfied with the results, or you may only like certain parts of what you create, but that's all part of the process. Now you know how to explore it—so go for it!
Exercise 03: Rhythmic variation
The final concept for improving your solos is expanding your rhythmic vocabulary. As I mentioned in the previous exercise, you can use rhythmic variations to resolve issues in transitions between chords, but I want you to take it a step further. Go back to the exercises from the "How to Practice Effectively" section and apply the different rhythmic patterns I’m providing to all of them.
In the next exercise, we’ll connect the five F minor pentatonic scale shapes using triplets.
Once you can play the exercise comfortably, try altering it slightly—add rests or remove certain notes—while maintaining the overall pattern.
Here’s a chart featuring 12 essential rhythmic patterns that are key to developing a strong soloing technique:
Whole note
Half note
Quarter notes
Eighth notes
Triplets
Sixteenth notes
Eighth notes + sixteenth notes
Eighth notes + sixteenth notes
Eighth notes + sixteenth notes
Dotted eighth notes + sixteenth notes
Dotted eighth notes + sixteenth notes
Dotted quarter note + eighth note
Start by creating exercises that focus on each rhythmic variation individually. Once you're comfortable with them, start combining different patterns for more dynamic practice.
The purpose of practicing so many exercises isn't for your solos to sound exactly like the examples, but to gradually internalize the concepts. By working through each exercise individually, you'll absorb these ideas over time, and they will naturally start to appear in your playing. Be patient—it’s a lot of hard work, but this is the only way to achieve great results.
In the next section, I’ll provide a few additional chord progressions in the key of F minor for you to apply and practice all the concepts we've covered so far.
CHORDS & CHORD PROGRESSIONS IN THE KEY OF F MINOR
Before we dive into the new chord progressions, let’s quickly review the chords that belong to the key of F minor and how to play them in both drop-2 and drop-3 voicings. If you’re unfamiliar with these formats, you can find detailed explanations in the articles linked below.
And here are the chord progressions:
Fm7 Abmaj7 Bbm7 Cm7 (Im7 bIIImaj7 IVm7 Vm7)
Fm7 Abmaj7 Bbm7 C7 (Im7 bIIImaj7 IVm7 Vm7)
*In this chord progression, the C7 actually comes from either the harmonic or melody minor scale. It'll still work if you follow the rule of emphasizing the chord tones of each chord on the down beats.
Fm7 Eb7 Dbmaj7 Eb7 (Im7 bVII7 bVImaj7 bVII7)
Fm7 Eb7 Fm7 Eb7 (Im7 bVII7 Im7 bVII7)
Fm7 Abmaj7 Bbm7 Dbmaj7 (Im7 bIIImaj7 IVm7 bVIm7)
Fm7 Abmaj7 Bbm7 Eb7 (Im7 bIIImaj7 IVm7 bVII7)
Fm7 Abmaj7 Dbmaj7 Bbm7 (Im7 bIIImaj7 bVImaj7 IVm7)
Fm7 Dbmaj7 Abmaj7 Eb7 (Im7 bVImaj7 bIIImaj7 bVII7)
Fm7 Bbm7 Eb7 Bbm7 (Im7 IVm7 bVII7 IVm7)
Fm7 Eb7 Dbmaj7 Bbm7 (Im7 bVII7 bVImaj7 IVm7)
And if you need to understand more of how chord progressions are made, you can read my article on chord progressions.
HELP ME CREATE THE BEST GUITAR METHOD IN THE WORLD!
As a thank you for reading this far, I’m excited to offer you a 50% discount on my latest book, Book of Chords. This book shows you how to take the chord concepts from this website (Triads, Drop-2 chords, Drop-3 chords, Shell Chords & Extensions, Triads & Extensions, Arranging Songs) and use them to create new voicings, arrange songs, build fresh lines for your solos, and expand your rhythmic vocabulary. Simply use the promo code GUITAR50 at checkout to grab your copy and enjoy it over the next few months or years!
All I ask in return is a little feedback. Let me know what you think—whether anything was tricky to understand, if there’s something I should add, or if you’ve got any other thoughts. I update my books all the time, and you’ll get every new version with everyone’s suggestions. Hopefully, one day this site will be a full platform for guitar theory courses with your help!
Shoot me your questions or thoughts at info@guitartheorylessons.com, and I’ll get back to you in a few days.
Digital Download
PDF Sheet Music + TAB (228 pages)
This book uses the Triads & Extensions topic to demonstrate all the exercises, but the concepts can be applied just as effectively to Triads, Drop-2, Drop-3, Shell Chords, Extensions, and even song arrangements.
What's Included?
Instructions
Appendix of Triads & Extensions
Harmonizing (Creating interesting voicings to comp and arrange)
Arpeggios Drills (Economic picking exercises + Creating new arpeggios using different voicings)
Chromatic Approaches (Bebop style technique)
Rhythmic Vocabulary
All types of triads with extensions in all 12 keys!
Triads included:
major triads
minor triads
major triads w/ dominant function
diminished triads
suspended 4th triads
augmented triads
Lydian triads
augmented triads w/ dominant function
Lydian triads w/ dominant function
Extensions included:
Or if you're looking for something simpler, you can find the Appendix of Triads & Extensions, Intervals, Drop-2, Drop-3 chords, Shell Chords & Extensions, and Scales & Modes, in the STORE section.
All of these theory concepts are available for free on my blog to anyone interested in learning more about music. However, producing this content is time-consuming, so if you found this article helpful, please leave a comment and hit the like button at the bottom of this page! Thank you for everything!
All my best,
Rodrigo Moreira
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