On the piano
The keyboard shows the same five notes as a shape you can see. The colored keys are the A minor pentatonic scale, and the pale keys are the rest of A natural minor.
A minor pentatonic scale on the whole neck
42 notes of the A minor pentatonic scale are marked across six strings.
This is every place the notes of the A minor pentatonic scale fall on the guitar, with each note's name and its scale degree. The roots are marked so you can find your bearings.
“Pentatonic” simply means five notes. The minor pentatonic is carved from the natural minor scale, which in A is the seven white keys from A to A, and a later lesson looks at it closely. Numbered against the major scale, where a ♭ marks a note a semitone lower, the natural minor is 1, 2, ♭3, 4, 5, ♭6 and ♭7. The minor pentatonic leaves out the two notes most likely to cause trouble, the 2 and the ♭6, and what remains is 1, ♭3, 4, 5 and ♭7.
In A that gives you A, C, D, E and G. None of those five notes sits a semitone away from a note of the A minor chord, so you can land on any of them and it sounds deliberate. Over a dominant seventh chord such as A7, which is a major chord with a ♭7 added on top, the C rubs against the chord’s C♯, and blues players use that tension on purpose. This forgiving quality is the main reason the scale is usually the first one guitarists learn.
On a piano the five notes are five keys, and you can see at once that no two of them are a semitone apart. On a guitar each of the five appears about a dozen times across the neck. That is why guitarists use boxes. A box adds no new notes. It divides the same five pitch names into groups a hand can reach.
This lesson was drafted with the help of AI and checked by a person, and it may still contain a mistake. Its diagrams are drawn by Everyfret’s own software. How Everyfret is made