If you know the pentatonic or the blues scale you can actually play really amazing
jazz solos using just those notes let me show you how
now the pitfall of any scale is well it ends up sounding like scales and not music so it's
actually really important which notes we choose to use within those scales in our solos so i'm gonna
play for you a really good example of a jazz blue solo that only uses pentatonix here it is
do
so before we talk about this solo let's talk about what scales it's actually
using so it's using the minor pentatonic scale or in this case c minor panasonic
pretty simple it's root flat three to the four to the five to the seven right and that's the
pentatonic scale also we're using what's called the blues scale i sort of just think of it as a
minor pentatonic scale with a sharp four in it so it's like this here's the four sharp four
so
now we're also using the major pentatonic scale in here so a c major pentatonic would be
okay so armed with just these scales which most people actually know these already we're gonna
put together the solo so the first chord is c7 and so the first line that we play goes
okay so again our note choices really do matter and so to break up the linear passage of the
scale because at first we're really just walking down the scale so we're just going
to break it up we're using this c note right here right so we're going down to that low c
and then we're arriving at this f right here which is the root of the four chord which is
f7 now we're doing that through that sharp four that flat five however you want to look at it
in the blue scale to get to that f7 so again the notes that we choose are really important
to making a scale actually sound musical so then we continue the passage with more pentatonic stuff
now really important note choice coming up right here and that's where we play an e natural we go
now that comes straight out of the major pentatonic scale and that e
natural is the third of the c7 okay now the third of any chord is always a great note to
target in your solos because it's really going to make the chord changes come out
so even just using pentatonic scales we can still be targeting important chord
tones that are really gonna make that sound pop out and so that's really what makes this
first opening line so great and not just sound like pentatonix so it's
and then we break it up with the surprise right ah there's the chord changes so whenever you're
thinking about using pentatonix always think still about targeting chord tones
within the different chords so now we're going back to the f7 that's the four chord and it goes
okay we're just going right up the c minor pentatonic scale
now this is important here when we get to the sharp four diminished chord that's f sharp
diminished we are hitting this c note right so we are arriving at this c note now that c note is the
flat five of the f sharp diminished seventh again this is all just notes here coming from the major
and minor pentatonic scale but i'm intentionally landing on that c that flat five of the f sharp
diminished to really drive that home and then of course we go on to this super bluesy line
using the blues scale sounds like this and that's still over top of that f-sharp diminished seventh
and again we have this blue note that f sharp in this particular case the sharp four of the
blues scale the c blues scale that's really working nicely with the f sharp diminished so
and it resolves to that c7 one chord right there on a c natural note so again using chord tones
even within those pentatonics is really making us sound good and then to get to
the six chord the a7 we just play a very simple minor pentatonic idea
right now again that g note is what we're actually arriving on when we get to that a7 now the g
is actually the flat seven of the a7 so the seven is also another really important chord tone to
target when you're improvising it's the third and the seventh we call these the guide tones
are kind of the most important chord tones of each chord that if we're resolving to those
we're really going to sound good now the last line of this etude is d minor 7 g7
c7 so that's a 2 5 1 into c arriving at a c dominant seventh and really it's just bluesy
stuff right so typically when we're thinking about playing a two five one we're thinking about
right we're thinking about two five one ideas right but in this case it just goes
right only c minor pentatonic ideas so we can also just play pentatonix
when we're dealing with a key center right we're playing d minor seven we're playing g7 but c
minor pentatonic works over all of that because we're all in the key
of c there but also something to point out as well is we're using different rhythmic
concepts here to break up the line and make it more interesting like
right just that simple
makes the line so much more interesting than of course just playing eighth notes
over top of those chords in summary always make sure that you're targeting chord tones when you're
playing pentatonix over top of different chords always make sure you're breaking up your line
with rhythmic variety and always make sure that you're paying attention to how you can utilize
the different kinds of pentatonic scales to fit into those chord tones that you're trying to
target now by the way if you want to learn how to use pentatonix but with more bebop over top of a
minor blues that could be a really cool next video to explore so i have that up on the screen right
now for you to go check out we're gonna do a minor blues solo and you'll see some more cool concepts
over there all right that's all for today's video thanks for watching hope you found this valuable
like it if you did subscribe to the channel and we'll see you in the next video cheers