can you tell me a little bit more about which notes in a scale will bring out the sound of the scale more
thx
Well different scales will have different strong notes. If you don't know the keys and their modes, then it'll be pretty useless because you won't properly understand how and when to use them.
But just for future reference, I'll help you out.
I did this myself the other month as a little experiment thing and it worked. This is what I did:
The A natural Minor Scale is 7 notes (A,B,C,D,E,F,G)
The A Pentatonic Minor scale uses the same notes, but only 5 of them (A,C,D,E,G)
These 5 notes are the strongest notes in this particular scale and so that's why this scale works so well over an Amin chord or any chord progression in the key of Amin.
Now, what I did was take all of the modes of one key and pick out 5 notes so then I'd end up with 7 pentatonic scales (5 note scales) that all emphasised each of the modes.
To do this, I had to figure out which intervals of the Natural Minor scale were being used for the Pentatonic version. I found out that it was:
Root = A
3rd = C
4th = D
5th = E
7th = G
Now all you need to do to get a pentatonic version of the Major scale (or Ionian mode) is to use these same intervals but starting on different notes each time, just like you do when you play through the modes.
I won't go through them all in detail but I'll just do 2 examples.
This is the A Natural Minor scale and in bold are the notes that are picked for the Pentatonic.
A B C D E F G
If you took the Lydian mode in the key of C and picked out the same intervals, you'd get a Pentatonic version of the F Lydian mode. It would be like this:
F G A B C D E
Notice that the 1st, 3rd, 4th, 5th and 7th notes have been bolded, just like the Amin Pent scale.
You can play the Amin Pent scale 2 ntoes per string like this:
E--------------------5-8--
B----------------5-8------
G------------5-7----------
D--------5-7--------------
A----5-7------------------
E-5-8---------------------
And so you could also play the F Lydian Pentatonic 2 notes per string too:
E---------------------1-5--
B-----------------1-5------
G-------------2-4----------
D---------2-3--------------
A-----2-3------------------
E-1-5----------------------
If you play that, it will REALLY sound like the Lydian mode because all the strong notes are there.
Now all you have to do is go through all the modes like that and create pentatonic scales out of them, arrange them 2 notes per string and practise using them in context over an Amin backing track.
I hope you and some others can maybe find this useful 'cause it took a fucking while to type!! But if you actually take the time (10mins) to sit down with a pen and some paper and get this down, you'll find that you'll have much more interesting ideas when improvising once you've learnt all the 7 diatonic pentatonic scales of one key.
Enjoy.