Pentatonic Chord Tone Soloing
Most of us learn to solo by picking one scale and riding it through the whole progression. It works, in the sense that nothing sounds wrong. It also means every chord gets the same treatment, and a listener can hear that you are playing over the changes rather than with them.
This PDF does the opposite, and it is simpler than it sounds: use a different pentatonic scale for each chord. You already know the five shapes. The method is knowing which one goes where, and keeping them close enough together that you are not leaping around the neck to reach them.
Then it goes one level down, into the notes inside those shapes that actually carry the sound — which is where the title comes from, and where most scale books stop.
Download the PDF →What’s inside
- How to get both a major and a minor sound out of the same five pentatonic shapes
- A scale for each chord over four common progressions, including one that throws most players
- The Rule of 5 — the same idea in five places on the neck, so you can do it wherever your hand already is
- A soloing study over a Hendrix-style ballad in E minor
- Which notes inside each scale carry the sound, and which two just fill the gaps
- What to aim for the moment the chord changes, and why it is the third
- Five arpeggio pairs with a practice task for each
The part most scale books leave out
G Minor Pentatonic and Bb Major Pentatonic are the same five notes. Not similar — identical. Same frets, same shapes, same notes in the same order. One sounds minor and the other sounds major.
Which means the scale is not what makes the sound. The notes you lean on are.
Once you can see that, soloing over changes stops being a question of picking the right scale and becomes a question of two or three notes per chord. The last third of this book is about finding those notes and landing on them, with an arpeggio pair and a task for each of the five shapes.
18 pages, diagrams throughout, no theory you do not need. It is free.
This book keeps chord tones inside the pentatonic frame, because that is the fastest way in. The Simple Chord Tone Soloing System drops the frame entirely and works the same idea by interval and by ear, across rock, blues, jazz and fusion. Also free.
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