THE NEXT STEP
HEXATONIC SCALE PATTERNS
Phil Mann is a stage and session star and educator extraordinaire. Get ready to step up your bass game!
Hello again! After our introduction to major and minor pentatonic scales, and a brief escapade into pentatonic substitutions, let’s scale up our knowledge from a humble five-note pattern to something more sophisticated.
First, let’s recap a few fundamentals. Pentatonic scales are five-note structures, produced by removing the semitones from a scale, leaving the triad and two other intervals which produce minimal dissonance.
The so-called ‘minor pentatonic blues’ scale has six notes rather than five, which means that it is in fact a hexatonic scale
Sometime Hendrix bassist Billy Cox
EXERCISE ONE
This exercise shows us that the minor pentatonic scale consists of a root note, minor third, perfect fourth, perfect fifth, and finally the minor seventh. Can you perform these two measures in all 12 keys? I think you can!