Steve Stine Guitar Lesson - One Simple Trick to Killer Pentatonic Solos

Hi there , Steve Stein from Guitar Zoom here and I wanna help you with something really cool that you can use if you're working on your pentatonic scale , your minor pentatonic scale and you want to expand it a little bit to make it just a little more interesting and a little more exciting for both you and your listener .

So let's just take a look at an a minor pentatonic scale .

We're gonna look at this first position right here .

Now , what I want you to think about here is if we added some new notes to this , it might really spice up what it is that you're normally doing with this scale , but we don't want to , to make it .

So it's not functional .

We still want to be able to use it in any style of music that you like to play .

So these notes are gonna be notes that are more bluesy in nature that we can add into this scale , but it makes a really big difference .

So what I want you to do here is let's go ahead and move to the uh seventh fret of the fourth string , which is the A or the root of the scale .

And what we're gonna do is we're gonna add in this note right here .

So we're gonna do a hammer on from 5 to 6 here .

Ok .

Now , I can still use the original 57 that I would always use in my minor pet .

That sounds just fine .

But if I choose to , what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play this 5 to 6 .

I'm gonna skip that seven at this point .

So let's say I'm playing up the Pentatonic scale .

Now , let's say I'm moving towards the ceiling here .

I'm gonna come back .

What do I do when we , when I get to that string ?

Well , I'm gonna play a seven again , then I'm going to play the 5 to 6 .

There's a camera on again .

So it sounds like this .

So when I'm moving towards the floor , I'm gonna bypass the seven entirely .

I'm just gonna play five and six .

And when I move towards the ceiling , I'm gonna play the seven and then I'm gonna play the 56 again .

So it sounds like this .

Oh , so nice and slow .

All I'm doing is this and then back down and what you're gonna notice is it adds this really cool blues rock element and the cool thing is I can use that note and different octaves , right ?

OK .

So you just think about it this way , you have these four notes right here that are minor Pentatonic and all .

You're doing is you're adding in this one note in between and if you're going to head towards the ceiling , then you would play .

No .

Does that mean that's the only way you can do this ?

Of course not , you can do it any way you like to .

It's just a suggestion .

Um , and right now what I'm doing is I'm using it as a hammer on .

You don't have to hammer it .

If you'd rather pick those , you can certainly do that as well .

But hopefully that one note used in multiple different places across your guitar will give you some new and fresh ideas uh to utilizing your guitar solos .