There is a second scale in the blues, and it is not a new shape. Take any box of the minor pentatonic, move it three frets down, and you are playing the major pentatonic of the same key. The fingering is identical. What changes is which notes land where the chords are.
The major pentatonic under one hand
Box 1 covers frets 4–7 and holds twelve notes.
This position covers frets 4 to 7, and every note of A Major Pentatonic lies under one hand there. Five positions like it cover the whole neck, and this is the first of them.
It sounds sweeter than the minor pentatonic, and that is not a matter of taste: it contains the major third, which is a note the I chord itself has, where the minor pentatonic’s ♭3 rubs against it.
Where it lands
The major third, through the twelve bars
C♯ rests over A7 C♯ rests over A7 C♯ rests over A7 C♯ rests over A7 C♯ leans onto C over D7 C♯ leans onto C over D7 C♯ rests over A7 C♯ rests over A7 C♯ passes through over E7 C♯ leans onto C over D7 C♯ rests over A7 C♯ passes through over E7
Read the row: it rests over A7, leans onto C over D7 and passes through over E7. A filled disc is a note you can stop on, a smaller one passes through and a tick under it leans onto the note below.
Read the row and you have the whole lesson. Over the I the major third rests — it is the chord’s own third. Over the IV it leans onto the note below it, because the chord underneath has a ♭7 a semitone away, and holding it there is the sound people mean when they say the major pentatonic “does not work” over the four chord. It works. It just wants to move.
Over the V it passes through. So the scale is at home for the first four bars, restless in the fifth and sixth, and neutral at the end — which is a shape you can plan a chorus around.
This lesson was drafted with the help of AI, so it may contain a mistake. Its diagrams are drawn by Everyfret’s own software. How Everyfret is made