A Minor Pentatonic, Lap Steel Side

5 notes to the octave, mapped below onto this reader's CEGACE neck, with every A called out. Those markers are the useful part mid-bar: a chart moves under you, and the thing you need is where the root went — not where the pattern started.

Gritty, bluesy, and direct — five notes with no half steps, so each one lands with attitude over a minor or dominant chord. The sound of rock and blues lead playing.

Heard in: Blues, rock, hard rock, metal, funk, and soul solos — the first scale most lead players learn and the one they never leave.

With a bar instead of fingers, a scale is a set of stopping places rather than a set of grips, and the slide between two of them is as much of the line as either end.

Play it slowly against the audio until the shape stops being a shape, then take it to a chart counted in A and let the numbers pick their own notes out of it.