In this article, I’m going to introduce you to the minor pentatonic scale, explain where it comes from (and why you should care), and give you some tips on how to use and recognise it in the real world.

The minor pentatonic scale is a staple of rock and blues guitar, which is also quite common in metal, punk, and other genres of music influenced by those styles. As implied by ‘pentatonic’ in the name, the minor pentatonic scale is a five note scale which shares its scale notes with the natural minor scale.

While the two scales share notes, the use and overall sound of the minor pentatonic scale is quite different from the natural minor scale. The examples below show the A natural minor scale and A minor pentatonic scale.

A Natural Minor Scale (click to enlarge)

Listen to the A Natural Minor Scale
Click to read the rest…

The previous articles in the series have covered how to recognize the different qualities of triad – major, minor, augmented and diminished. Not only can we learn to hear the quality of triads, we can learn to hear their inversion. First we will briefly review the basic theory of inversions.

Inversions

Triads are made up of three pitches, a root, third and fifth. It is possible for any of its members to be the lowest note. A triad, therefore, has three possible positions, or “inversions”: root position, first inversion and second inversion, with the root, third, or fifth respectively, as the lowest note:

The three inversions of a triad

1. The root, first and second inversions of a triad

We spent quite a bit of time working on root position triads in an earlier article. We will begin studying inversions by first considering their interval content from the lowest pitch to the highest.

As we already know, root position triads contain stacked thirds, and a fifth from the root to the highest member. As we saw before, it is the quality of these intervals that determines its type.

We can observe a similar idea with inversions. Click to read the rest…

This article is part 2 of ‘Learning To Recognize Triads’ – make sure you’ve read Part 1 first! You should make sure you are quite comfortable with major and minor triads before moving onto the material below.

Diminished Triads

The next triad to work with is the diminished triad. It has a minor third and diminished fifth above the root. The distance from the third to the fifth is also a minor third:

C Diminished Triad

1. A C Diminished Triad

The diminished triad naturally occurs on the seventh scale degree of a major scale. If you are using solfege the syllables are: ti re fa. Here are a few examples to get you going – as before, listen to the triad and sing it back. Then try singing a diminished triad given a starting pitch from your instrument: Click to read the rest…