A Minor Pentatonic Extensions

I'm taking a look at the two common A minor pentatonic extensions. We can also do these in any key as well.

What You'll Learn:

• What an octave means and why it's called that

• How to think parallel instead of vertical on the fretboard

• The lower extension using open E and G notes (frets 3 and 5)

• The higher extension - the "house shape" at frets 8-10

• How to visualize the house with a triangular roof

• Where your A root notes are located in the extensions

• The important connecting note at 9th fret string 3

• How to slide into the 9th fret position

• Why these extensions are the same notes as C major pentatonic

• How relative major and minor scales share the same notes

Thinking Parallel, Not Vertical

We can play a lot more than that, and a way that we can maximize the amount of notes we can play on guitar is rather than thinking vertically, do it a bit like we've done with the E minor pentatonic. Think more parallel rather than vertical and straight - we're going to think more parallel and horizontal as well. The most efficient way to do that is going lower than this A and doing something we looked at a little bit already in Beginner Electric.

Lower Extension

The easiest way would be to go lower than this A and include this G note here. It's also being aware that this E and this G can be part of the A minor pentatonic - we just need to see that A as our root note or our start note of the scale. Really crucial concept because there's going to be a lot of crossover between common keys, just like a C chord actually uses some of the same notes as a G chord - they're very different chords.

The Extension

There's our start note of our A minor pentatonic, but a common extension takes us through that one octave. But we have therefore gone one note lower which wasn't available to us without moving position. So this is a scale extension because it has to go lower than what we call shape one or position one. I'd really recommend already practicing this scale shape one in your mind like this if you haven't already, because it'll really help you play the riffs that are going to be coming up in this course.

Higher Extension

When we get to this higher point, quite limiting because this is the highest note we've got, and we've actually got a lot more notes from the minor pentatonic here. What I want you to visualize here is put your first finger where the third finger was - the highest note of A minor pentatonic. We're going to put our first finger there and then we've got four notes - one, two, three, four - these are absolutely the most important ones because they're so good. They're actually an exact repetition of one, two, three, four here where this is our A root note, and this is also an A root note.

The House Shape

Any licks that you play in any licks that you learn can also be played between 8th fret and 10th fret. That is our number one scale extension. We do often jump positions when we're doing that - jumping straight to that is totally fine. We don't have to walk up all those notes. But there is one very important connecting note, and it's this one at 9th fret string 3. You can slide to the 9th fret, the last dot on your guitar, and then we've got 8 to 10, 8 to 10. This is our A root note just like this is an A root note here and here.

The House Visualization

Often we see this as a house - this can be the house of blues. Some people call it that, though we can use that in a different way. But this is a good visualization where we can see the building of the house and then a triangular roof on top of the house. Absolutely the best way to see it.

Relative Major Connection

Final point: these are all the same notes that would be used in the C major pentatonic, because we have a relative major and minor pentatonic. This is just a recap - when you're learning all these extensions here, these are the same extensions that are used in C major pentatonic to play solos such as "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis. Exactly the same notes I'm looking at here, including all the licks, including all the extensions. It can be very common to use the middle finger here, but it really doesn't matter.

Moving Forward

Before we start learning more full positions of shape - we've got shape one already, or position one or box one, those all mean the same thing - we've got box two, box three, box four, and there's five in total. Before we start learning those five, these extensions are the things to be learning at this point.