David's Tip of the Day: 12 Bar Blues Minor Pentatonic Scale Exercise by Jason Ricci

Here's a new post by Jason Ricci on playing the Minor Pentatonic Scale. Soloing Scales are used to guarantee a quality. Use the Major Pentatonic Scale (2 3" 3 4 5+ 6+) to give your soloing a light quality (such as for Jump & Swing Blues and ballads) and use the Minor Pentatonic Scale (2 3' 4+ 4 5 6+) for a dark/bluesy/minor quality. This scale, as well as the Blues Scale (which just adds the flat-5... 2 3' 4+ 4' 4 5 6+), contains no notes that will clash with minor... they are the go-to scales for minor playing.

Using these scales will not guarantee an inspiring solo... that's up to your creativity... but it does guarantee a dark feel and that you won't hit any "wrong" notes (later these wrong notes can be great, but used unintelligently, or without years of listening experience, they can sound quite bad). It will take time to develop the skill set to be able to dynamically move around the harmonica and not hit notes outside of the scale, but it's worth the practice.

Here's his video https://youtu.be/pe6R-n45DaQ

P.S., If you like what Jason offers, support him. It's a hard lifestyle being a musician and teacher. Let's show Jason how much we appreciate what he does and send him some holiday cheer. I sent $100 to get the ball rolling. His PayPal email is jasonricci1@gmail.com (don’t forget the #1 in the email)