What is pentatonic scale?

Bending notes in the pentatonic scale, which ones (Am)?

• I am an intermediate guitar player, but I am completely new to rhythm and blues guitar, I am just learning it because it will help me solo. I am working on the Am Pentatonic Scale right now and I have a few questions. --Why does it only sound good when I bend the 7th fret of the G string, and what other notes in the Am pentatonic can I bend? --Is it important for me to learn all of the pentatonic postions? Do I need to learn other scales. Again I am going to play lead and I need to be good at improv. what scales should I learn.

• Answer:

  You can bend at several points on that particular scale (like the 8th pos. on the thin E string) but it depends on the chords of the song being played at the time you're soloing. Experimenting will clarify things. You don't have to learn scale positions all over the place. Some of the earliest blues players did quite fine staying in one position. However, by learning that scale, at a given key, at different positions will allow you to play all over the neck. Without getting overly complicated, if there's another position of the Am Pentatonic over by, say, the 10th fret, you can connect that one with the 5th pos. one by learning the appropriate notes to play on the 4th or 3rd strings that will connect the 2 positions together and make it seem like one huge, spaced out, scale overlapping all 6 strings. Apart from the visually pleasing effect of letting your fingers walk from the 6th string, 5th pos. up to the 10th+ position, and the sonically pleasing effect of being in tune with the underlying chord, with practice you'll come to hear tonal differences b/c of the size of the strings. This tonal difference will come in handy later when you get better at improv & come to know that it'd be better to play with, say, a lighter tonality over this passage, than a heavier one You can do well with Pentatonic alone (so many guitarists have) but there's a sonic charm to modes like Dorian, Mixolydian, & Lydian. These arrangements of notes aren't scales, per se, b/c the root of each is based on the degree of a .major scale. (Lose you yet?) If you play a C major scale, its a C major scale. Yet if you take the same scale & start at the 2nd note of the scale (D), & finish an octave later, you'll have played D Dorian. Knowing these modes comes in handy if you want to play something other than a D major or minor scale-based riff over a D chord.