COOLEST Pentatonic Scale Hacks EVER

Intro
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Hey everyone, so today I’m going to show you a cool phrase using the D minor pentatonic scale. I’ll also talk about some fragments from that scale and how you can use them for your pentatonic phrases.

Chord Substitution
First things first, we have this chord I started with. One thing you can learn from this chord is that you can replace the roots in your triads. Hopefully, you’ve been working on your triads. What we’re going to do right now is replace each root of that triad with a 9 or a second degree.

For example, if you’re in C major, it will sound like this:

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C major triad:

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And we get this sound:

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First, if we’re going to stay in the C major tonality. For E minor, this is going to be a flat nine:

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And then for F, if we change it, we get this, which is the same shape that we had for C major seven:

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For G7, we can do this:

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A minor:

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Just from that first chord I played, you can already learn a bunch of cool chords by moving them diatonically.

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Notes
Okay, so after that, I played this:

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You can already feel this kind of quintuplet feel, which in classical terms is Teddy Gina Dom:

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If you move this diatonically, you’re going to get a bunch of cool stuff.

Whenever I’m playing a pentatonic scale, I like to think about some diatonic stuff from the Dorian scale. In this case, from the third degree of the F major, we can construct a cool sound like the add9:

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So that’s a really cool sound you can start using in your pentatonic lines.

Pentatonic Shapes
This shape is one of my favorite shapes of the pentatonic scale, and this is a sus arpeggio:

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This kind of structure:

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Is super cool and also comes from the knowledge of triads. For example, if you know a G major triad and raise the third, you get a sus4 (G sus4). Over D minor, this gives us the fourth, the seven, and the roots:

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Triads
This pattern is actually something I learned from Michael Brecker:

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He uses some chromatics in his solos and “Impressions” with McCoy Tyner. What I’m using here is closer to the pentatonic scale without any chromatics. This is more of a pentatonic or Dorian thing, and I’m adding a 9 as well.

You can see that this entire lesson can be viewed as either a Dorian or pentatonic lesson, which are basically pretty similar. What’s going on is I’m creating this structure around the nine:

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This nine is like a pivot tone. I could even take it further and just go like:

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A good concept is to take one note and aim with other notes around it, and then proceed with playing the arpeggio.

So this is the nine going to the root, the seven, the five, the flat three to the root.

What you can learn from this is that whenever you’re learning an arpeggio, start adding the nine into it. Even if it’s a four-note arpeggio, like a minor seven arpeggio, you can also add the nine to get more color.

So far, we have:

• Cool chord
• Cool structure
• Cool major 7 arpeggio from the third
• Cool pentatonic sus4 sound
• This sus arpeggio from the 4th degree of that pentatonic
• Structure with this pivot note being the nine
• A five-note arpeggio minor seven at nine

Just a little pentatonic movement, and I ended it by playing around the triad. You can see this is a second inversion triad of D minor.

Contour
Another thing to learn from this phrase is the contour. You have this kind of movement over the higher mid to high register of the instrument, moving within a position but then aiming forward to another position, including a lower register.

This is already another position; it’s actually the other position:

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And then another position right here:

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And then another position over here:

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So you see, I kind of moved within different positions, creating a longer phrase. This is important when you practice your positions, being able to phrase with any position you learn, and then it becomes a more horizontal, longer movement with flow and various cool ideas.

Outro
In this lesson, I shared some ideas that you can now take and implement into your pentatonic scale ideas. If you want to dive deeper, understand all of the triads, arpeggios, and how to apply these concepts over chord changes, and add chromatics, check out my Galactic Modern Guitar series. The link to access that is in the description of this video.

That’s it. As always, it’s been super fun. I can’t believe we’re about to hit 10,000 subscribers. By the way, if you haven’t hit the bell or subscribed yet, please make sure to do that now. I’m super excited about this channel.

Thanks so much for all the support, your comments, and joining Galactic Modern Guitar. It’s life-changing to me, and I hope to give you the best value I can. I’m really happy to do these videos, and it’s starting to become more natural to me.

Please, again, make sure to subscribe. If you’re interested in a cool video about more abstract sounds, check out this diminished scale video, which is pretty cool.

I’ll see you in the next video.

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