New Notes, New Keys
Once you know the notes on every string, it becomes much easier to play in any key. It also means you know what notes you are playing within any scale which makes it easier to communicate with other musicians. For example. you can’t say to a keyboard player "Play at the 5th fret", because they don’t have frets. You have to say exactly which note or chord you want them to play.
Let’s look again at the E form of the minor pentatonic scale. This time all the names of the notes are shown.
A Minor Pentatonic - E Form
Going back to the degrees of the scale it is now possible to equate them with specific notes.
A Minor Pentatonic
To change to a new key, you simply change positions on the fretboard to where the root note of the new key is and all the other notes will follow if you keep the same fingering. If, for example you wanted to transpose this E form scale to the key of C, you would simply move up three frets to the 8th position.
C Minor Pentatonic - E Form
Now you have a new key with new notes but the scale degrees remain relatively the same.
Here is the same scale transposed to the key of G. Now it is in the 3rd position.
G Minor Pentatonic· E Form
In this key the scale degrees would be as follows.
The next step is to memorize all 5 forms plus the two sliding patterns in the new key. The next few lessons will be using all these scales in the key of G.
