Essentials Part 1

Pentatonic Shape 1-3

To kick off our intermediate course, we need to learn all of our pentatonic shapes, and we will begin with the first 3 shapes which are pictured below. We will learn them in the key of A minor to start with. The three shapes can be found in the fretboard diagrams.

Pentatonic Shape 4-5

Let’s now add shapes 4 and 5 to our collection. Once again, we are learning them in the key of A minor. Be sure to visualise the shapes rather than specific frets. After shape 5, the shapes just start all over again with shape 1. You will often see players jump from shape 1 at the low part of the neck to shape 1 twelve frets up where it starts all over again!

5 Shape Pentatonic Exercise

To put our 5 shapes into practice, we will use this fun exercise! Remember to visualise the shapes as you go through the exercise and try to keep up with the beat. By playing along with the beat, you will learn the shapes more quickly and more completely. Take a look at the fretboard diagrams for the 5 shapes.

The "Airports" Theory!

The idea behind ‘airports’ on the fretboard is to give you a easy way to quickly find certain pentatonic shapes without having to necessarily move through them in order. There are times where you may want to kick your solo off in shape 4, for example, and this technique will help you do that! We learn this by attributing certain shapes to certain root notes. Here is the process described in the video:

1. Find the Root notes (in this case we find G on the E and A string)
2. Decide if we are in a major or minor key
3. In Minor, we hook up shape 1 to the E string root note and shape 4 to the A string root note.
4. In Major, we hook up shape 2 to the E string root note and shape 5 to the A string root note.

Take a look at the fretboard diagrams to see these steps a little more clearly.

Improvising Test

This video is all about putting the 'airports' theory into practice in various different keys over different backing tracks. To help you out, we have provided you with 5 backing tracks in different keys as well as the correct airport's pentatonic shapes via our fretboard diagram.