Do you want to develop your pentatonic scales for soloing all along and across the guitar fingerboard? If you do, then realize that you actually have to do a lot more than just learn a few guitar licks and riffs from your favorite songs...




In this video, I’m going to show you how (even if you know lots of pentatonic licks), you still might have a poor ability to solo because the notes in this area, (particularly the lateral note layout), are not as easily committed to memory and seldom developed for playing lead guitar as much as they could be.

WATCH THE VIDEO:





Work along with me in this lesson as I demonstrate a fantastic 2-string along the neck exercise for mastering the neck with the pentatonic scale patterns.

In this post I’m going to show you a simple Pentatonic exercise that you can do every day that will - “Guaranteed,” - help you develop an extremely high “Perfect” level of control over the Pentatonic scale.

This exercise is so straight-forward, that once you learn to do it, you’ll only need 25 seconds to run this exercise across the neck.




Here's each stage of the exercise:

(Key of Bb)


Stage 1). 6th and 5th strings



Stage 2). 5th and 4th strings



Stage 3). 4th and 3rd strings


Stage 4). 3rd and 2nd strings



Stage 5). 2nd and 1st strings





STUDY OF THE PATTERN:
Now that you understand how this exercise operates as a fully functioning drill. The next thing to do, is break it down in stages.

Start by learning each stage of the exercise and committing the stage to memory. Then slowly begin connecting one stage into the next.

Once all 5 stages are memorized treat the entire study as one concept and play it with a metronome all at once.

After this key has been developed, move the study to a new key each day rotating through every key for approximately one month.

If you spend the time studying this short Pentatonic exercise, it will help tremendously with getting you to think about your Pentatonic as traveling along (with the lateral span), of the neck.

Doing this work will also go a long way toward helping you think more horizontally when you improvise. Too often players play pentatonic in a vertical position.




CONCLUSION:
So many of our scale pattern exercises operate very vertical on the guitar, so going more horizontal with the scale will definitely get you to start playing phrases that move across more fingerboard positions.

You’ll find yourself coming up with all kinds of different phrases that operate across the fret-board positions, rather than operate within the positions.