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The Pentatonic Minor Scale
Also the minor scale has a pentatonic variant. The same principle applies: two of the seven tones should be ommitted. First, let's look at the "normal" minor scale. We'll look at the scale of A minor:
To make it a pentatonic scale, the second and sixth tones should be removed:
This results is the folowing scale:
And of course also this scale can be repeated above the octave:
You may wonder why in the major scale the fourth and seventh tone are
removed, while in the minor scale the second and sixth are removed.
In the first part of this music theory series we looked at parallels between major and minor. The same rules
apply here. C major and A minor are parallel scales, meaning they are built using the same tones.
In C major the fouth and seventh tones are the F and B. In A minor the F is the sixth and the B is the second.
So, the same tones are removed!
Let's listen to the A pentatonic minor scale:
A Pentatonic Minor on guitar
The Minor Blues Scale
To tranform this pentatonic minor scale into the minor blues scale, again a blue note is added. Following the parallel above, the same tone is added as in the C pentatonic major scale. The tone to add is the E flat (the tone between the third and fourth tone).
This is how it sounds:
A Minor Blues on guitar
Next we'll look at a variation of the minor scale: harmonic minor.
