RJN wrote:
Guys im somewhat confused by the MAJOR and Minor Pentatonic. ( Please excuse my lack of basic understanding )
so when , lets say we play a song ( again , plz excuse my lack of knowledge ) Gmaj, Dmaj and Amaj, can you play both the Major and Minor Pentatonics just as long as you start on the Neutral note or a note relative to it ?
Let me see if I can explain. I'm going to transpose your example of (Gmaj, Dmaj and Amaj) to C just to make reading the answer easier, but I'll transpose it back afterwards just to be complete.
Your three chords form the basis of a song in D major. You've listed them in a different order but a more logical order would be to list them in the order I, IV, V, or put differently Tonic, Subdominant, Dominant, or put differently Dmaj, Gmaj, Amaj. Now, let's transpose that to the key of C (as opposed to D) so we can get rid of "black" notes.
I = Tonic = Cmaj
IV = Subdominant = Fmaj
V = Dominant = Gmaj
I'm gonna stop using these maj suffixes now so when I say C, I mean Cmaj (and when I say Am I mean A minor).
You'll recall that Am is the relevant minor of C (I hope you do?). When you look at them they are virtualy exactly the same. Look at the scale of C:
C, D, E, F, G, A, B <- These are notes, not chords
Now, look at the scale of Am:
A, B, C, D, E, F, G
Can you see that the two are exactly the same with the only difference being that one starts on the note C while the other one starts on the note A? It's the intervals (distances) between the notes that make one sound like a major and the other sound like a minor.
The scales above are major diatonic and minor diatonic scales but the exact same relationship exists between major pentatonic scales and minor pentatonic scales. In other words, A minor pentatonic is pretty much the same thing as C major pentatonic, they just start on different notes.
Now your question was "when we play a song can you play both the Major and Minor Pentatonics just as long as you start on the Neutral note or a note relative to it?"
The question is phrased oddly because you're not saying which Major and Minor penatonic scales you're wanting to play. But, bearing the above in mind, yes, if your song is in the key of C you can play the C major pentatonic over it or the A minor pentatonic.
Having said that, there is something very neat about the pentatonic scales. You would end up with a rather unpleasant gemors if you played the C minor diatonic scale over C major but you can actually play a C minor pentatonic scale over C major. This is when you get the Blues. It's one of the core concepts in the Blues. Go try it, play a chord progression of C, F and G and then noodle over it with a C minor pentatonic scale and you'll feel the Blues immediately. When you noodle over it with a A minor pentatonic you'll notice that bluesy tension is gone and it sounds more like an ordinary Rock or Pop solo.
Now, just to transpose back to your original key. If you play a chord progression using D, G and A, you can play a D major pentatonic over it (or F# minor penatonic) for the "tension free" feel or you can play a D minor pentatonic over it for the bluesy feel.
I hope that helps. There are different ways to explain this and I'm sure other musos would use a different approach, like explaining the relationships between majors and minors with intervals. Lemme know if this doesn't make sense and you'd like a better exaplanation ?
