Joe Pinnavaia: Waking Up The Pentatonics

Pentatonics are commonly used in all types of music and at times can become over used and monotonous. Joe Pinnavaia:

In this article I hope to give a different perspective on this scale by using arpeggios. Some of you may be familiar with these techniques and some of you may not be. Hopefully all will find this article useful for helping create new ideas.

As we know, with any scale comes the associated arpeggios. For the pentatonic scale if we combine adjacent patterns we get what is referred to as the Extended Pentatonics. This greatly expands the fretboard and gives you greater distance between intervals. There is an almost Holdsworthian sound when you use this approach. Now by finding arpeggios within the scale we can get some pretty creative and interesting ideas that some might not expect from the pentatonic scale.

The first set of arpeggios are taken from the extended pentatonics in A minor and uses each box pattern and its adjacent counterpart. This is my own way of sweeping as I don't consider myself to be a proficient sweep picker. The hammer ons add a fluid motion that I find fits the hand in a ergonomic way that does not require bridging with one finger - another troublesome technique. more