How to Play a Major Pentatonic Scale

The pentatonic scale is one of the world's most widely-used collection of notes. Music from Africa, Asia, Europe and the United States uses the pentatonic scale in all kinds of genres. The pentatonic scale easy to sing and has a pleasant, natural character. As its name implies, it consists of only five notes, an amazing fact when considering how much music it's inspired over the centuries.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Pick a starting note for your pentatonic scale. For simplicity's sake, we'll use middle C on the piano as the starting note for our example.

2. Play the first three notes of your starting note's major scale. Using C-major as our example, these would be C, D and E. These are three of the five notes found in the pentatonic scale.

3. Move up to your scale's dominant, or fifth note. In the key of C this is G, regardless of whether we're using its major or minor mode. This is the fourth note of the pentatonic scale.

4. Go up a whole tone to the sixth note of your starting note's major scale, which in the case of our example is A. This is the fifth and final note of the pentatonic scale.

5. Play the five notes you've found in any order you want. Part of the fun of the pentatonic scale is how hard it is to make it sound bad during improvisation.

Tips & Warnings

• Playing only the black notes of a piano also produces the pentatonic scale.