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
28 notes of the A minor pentatonic scale are marked across four strings.
This is every place the notes of the A minor pentatonic scale fall on the ukulele, with each note's name and its scale degree. The roots are marked so you can find your bearings.
The minor pentatonic is the natural minor scale with two notes removed: the second and the sixth. Over a minor chord, those are the two that sit a semitone away from a note of the chord and can sound like mistakes. The five notes that remain sound deliberate wherever you land.
That forgiving quality is the main reason it is usually the first scale people learn to improvise with. The notes most likely to clash have already been taken out for you.
The diagram shows the five notes against the seven they were taken from, so you can see what was removed rather than learning the five as an unrelated shape.
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