Bass Scales: The Major Pentatonic

So we’ve covered the major scale, but that scale contains a whole 7 notes…and half of them don’t even sound that great. Couldn’t we just cut out the “bad” or “boring” notes, and only use the “main” notes?

Well, all of the notes in the scale have their uses…but we can still condense the major scale into something else- the major pentatonic scale!

Scale Degrees

The major scale, if you remember from before (or, if you haven’t read it already, go and read the major scale post linked to above), is the basis for how we look at all other scales.

What I mean by that is: the major scale has 7 notes, and we number them from 1 to 7. Number 1 is the tonic (or root note), and each note letter gets a separate number until we reach 7 (where we should be back at the first letter as there are 7 letters).

Here is a C major scale, for example:


1 2 3 4 5 6 7 1
C D E F G A B C

Stripped Down Scale

With this in mind, we create the major pentatonic scale by taking out the 4th and 7th degrees. Giving us this:


1 2 3 5 6 1
C D E G A C

Harmonically (i.e. with chords) it’s the same- so if you have a chord progression in a major key you could think in terms of the major pentatonic…if it’s easier…

…although this scale is more useful for creating riffs than following chords.

Here is the C major pentatonic scale on the bass neck:


G ----------------7-9-
D -----------7-10-----
A ------7-10----------
E -8-10---------------

…and here is an example bassline that uses it over a Cmajor6 chord:


G ----------------------
D --------7-10-7-------
A ---7-10--------10-7--
E -8--------------------

Here’s another example for a Dminor9 chord:


G ---------9----------
D ----7-10---10-7-----
A --------------------
E -10-----------------

July 6, 2011 at 7:00 pm | Bass Scales | No comments