Beginners’ Lesson

This month we’re going to continue our choose-your-own-adventure look at improvisation by revisiting an idea that we looked at a while back about pentatonic scales. One of the things we noted was that major and minor pentatonic shapes come in pairs: there’s a major for every minor that shares the same set of notes, and vice versa. It’s the same idea as the concept of modes, for those of you that have looked into that, but at a much simpler level.

Let’s recap how that relationship works. C major is often our start point for explaining things because it is the key that has no sharps or flats, so we have fewer elements to keep track of while naming the notes we’re using. Let’s look at a C Major pentatonic. We can see that the notes are C D E G A C—that is, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th notes of a C Major scale.

The relative minor key of C Major is A minor. We can find the relative minor by either going down a