Alternative Pentatonics

Book excerpt: I actually wrote this book as a practice guide for myself because I wanted a way to get different and outside sounds using pentatonic scales, as well as to improve my chops and have a huge variety of new sounds at my fingertips to play over the chords you see 90% of the time such as major/major7, minor/minor7, and dominant chords, among others. As well as being a scales book Alternative Pentatonics is also a method to practice improvising over common chords using uncommon groups of five notes. Five notes are somewhere between an arpeggio and a scale, as well as being the ideal number of notes to craft some really nice phrasing (in my opinion), as I’m sure you realized when you first learned your minor pentatonic scale and started jamming over a 12-bar blues. This book contains 28 new pentatonic scales divided into chord types so that you’ll know exactly what chords you can use them over. For the intermediate player: this book will give you plenty of new and interesting options for playing over common chords and force you out of standard pentatonic scales and/or the major scale modes. For the more advanced player: this book could be more about exploring possibilities than learning scale patterns; in fact, I would suggest that advanced players avoid even remembering the patterns in this book. Instead, they can be used to explore the improvisational terrain and find new sounds, then filed away in your subconscious and allowed to seep into your playing while you’re in the throes of improvisation. So, if you’re stuck in a soloing rut or are looking for new sounds, outside sounds, exotic sounds, or even a few downright weird sounds, this is the book for you.