Pentatonic scales are the most common starting point in guitar improvisation — but most players use only a fraction of what’s available to them. Joel Purnell shows you how to go further: both by squeezing more out of the shapes you already know and by creating entirely new five-note scales with their own distinctive colours.
What you’ll get out of this lesson
Joel explains the concept of synthetic pentatonics — custom-built five-note scales derived by applying pentatonic logic to any interval combination — and shows you how to get far more out of your existing pentatonic knowledge at the same time.
What Makes a Pentatonic?
A pentatonic scale is simply any scale built from five notes per octave. The minor pentatonic you already know is one of many possible five-note configurations — it just happens to be the most widely used in Western popular and blues music. Once you understand that the “penta” part (five notes) is the defining characteristic, you realise you can construct an almost unlimited number of pentatonic scales by choosing any five intervals within the octave. Each combination produces its own harmonic colour.
Creating Synthetic Pentatonics
Joel’s approach to creating synthetic pentatonics involves taking the familiar logic of the standard shapes — the way pentatonics skip certain scale degrees to create a clean, open sound with no “avoid” notes — and applying it to different starting intervals. By shifting which notes you include and exclude from a parent scale, you can create five-note groupings that sound exotic, modal, or simply fresh in a way that your regular pentatonic vocabulary can’t produce. The goal is not to memorise a list of new shapes, but to understand the process so you can construct what you need in context.
Getting More From What You Already Know
Perhaps the most immediately useful part of Joel’s lesson is his work on expanding what you can do with the traditional pentatonic shapes you already have. Most players use these shapes in a fairly narrow way — running up and down, hitting the same bends in the same places. Joel shows how shifts in phrasing, starting points, intervallic skips within the shape, and rhythmic displacement can make the same five notes sound completely different. The synthetic approach and the traditional approach are two sides of the same coin: both are about getting more musical mileage from a small set of notes.
Taking it further
Once you’re comfortable with the idea of building synthetic pentatonics, try comparing your creations to existing modal scales — you’ll often find that your “new” scale is a rotation or subset of something already named. That’s fine. The point, as with any creative process, is the discovery, not the novelty.
Your homework
Take the minor pentatonic you know in your most comfortable position and alter just one note — raise or lower it by a semitone and listen to the effect. Play it over a static minor chord backing track. Then try a different alteration. Document which ones sound interesting to you and why. That’s the beginning of a synthetic pentatonic practice.