 Guitar and Excel. Pentatonic scale fret 5 fingering. Get ready and don't fret. Remember, the board's been fretted, so you don't have to be. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay because we basically built this from a blank worksheet, but did so in prior presentation. So if you want to build this from a blank worksheet, you may want to begin back there. However, you don't necessarily need access to this workbook if looking at this from a music theory standpoint because we'll simply use it as a tool to map out the fret board. Give us the notes scale chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook though, there's currently nine tabs down below. We've got a bunch of example tabs and then we've got the OG Orange tab. The OG Orange tab representing the original worksheet we put together in a prior section. It now acting as the starting point going forward, mapping out the entire fret board, giving us the entire musical alphabet and letters in number format and combining the letter and number format, providing a key that can be adjusted with this green cell, which will adjust the scales of the worksheets on the right hand side, which then provide the notes in the scale. We're focused in on the chord constructions from the notes in the scale and interval information. We then wanted to focus on the C major scale and look first at the chord constructions from the notes in the C major scale starting with the one chord. We did that over here. We're looking at open position, frets one through three is what I'm defining that as. We mapped out the one three five of the C major chord, discussed it in detail. We then went to the four chord F major, mapped it out in open position, discussed it. We went to the five chord, mapped it out, discussed it. We went back to the two chord because that's a minor chord construction. D minor, discussed it, went to the E minor, discussed it, A minor, discussed it, and then we went to the diminished and discussed that. Now by doing that, if you combine all that together, you basically end up with this blue box down here, which is the major scale construction. What we want to do now is look at this in another light, now looking at it in terms of the scale constructions, but not starting with open position. We'll get to there, but instead moving to the middle of the guitar and we're going to start learning the middle of the guitar using a scale position rather than chords directly. And then we'll go back and learn the middle of the guitar with chords with the caged system. So we put this worksheet together in a prior presentation to help us to build out what we're going to do. It looks long, it looks messy, it looks scary. But what we're going to do now is copy this over and focus on one chunk at a time and this is going to be this middle chunk on the fifth fret. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down control, left click and drag this to the right. And so this is going to be here and I'm just going to call this practice pentatonic fret five, let's say fret five. Okay, let's get fret five fingering. Let's do that. And then I'm going to make it blue just to show that that's the one that we're focused on. So I'm going to right click and make it blue. Okay, so what I'd like to do now is basically hide everything we have up top. So this shape, and I'll actually just remove this stuff. I'm going to remove the colored boxes here. Maybe I keep that one. Removing the colored boxes. And then you'll note that this fretboard goes up to 12 frets and then it starts over to 24 frets. So not many guitars are 24 frets. They're going to be around, you know, somewhere around this length a little bit longer than that length, right? So this length, if you just look at this fret five, which I'll even bring it down to here. Let's just look at fret five is basically pretty close to the middle of the guitar. That's why it's a great place to start. So I'm going to hide this side of the guitar and we'll just focus on just that bit. I'm going from J to Y, right click and hide. And then I'm going to hide and then you could keep this side of the guitar to look at the open positions that we looked at before. We'll open up again later so we can check that out. But for now, I'm even going to hide that and I'm just going to select that right click and hide that. So now we can focus just on that fret five. So that's right in the middle of the guitar. Now on the right hand side, I also want to see the minor construction on the right. So I'm going to hide this AT to squish this together as close as I can. Hide this and then I'm going to hide from this cell on to the minor construction and hide this. So when we think about this pentatonic scale, you'll recall that this is basically just taking the major scale and removing two of the notes from it. By doing that, when we went through all of these chord constructions, we looked at it in terms of the related pentatonic scale in the key of C. And you'll note that all of the other chord constructions don't always fit in the pentatonic scale, although they will fit all these chords, for example, don't always fit in the pentatonic scale. For example, clearly the four chord isn't going to fit in the pentatonic scale because we're missing the F, right? It's not going to be in there. But when we look at the major chord, the pentatonic scale will work perfectly, and we look at the minor chord construction, the pentatonic scale will work perfectly. So therefore, when we think about a normal pentatonic scale, we're usually attributing it to the major, in this case the C major, or its relative minor. In our case, that's going to be the A minor, which is always going to be in any position, it's going to be the sixth of the major construction. So pentatonic scale in your mind, you're usually thinking, okay, that's going to be related to the C major and the A minor. You can play the pentatonic scale possibly as you're moving through chords, right? That's right, from like a C, and if you're playing in the key of C, and then you play an E minor and an F or something, and you're noodling around in between those chords, you can play the pentatonic scale, and you'll be safe because you're playing something that's in the key of C, but you'll not be having some of those notes that might be in the chord that you're in. So like the F, and if you wanted to target that F, then you can either switch your mind to be thinking, I'm going to be playing in the major construction, because if I look in the major construction, it would be there because we constructed that chord from the major scale of the C scale, right? Or you can think of it, I'm still going to be playing in minor, but I'm going to add that, basically that note. Some people like to think of it different ways. Some of the benefits of the minor construction is that you get all of these notes that generally tend to work well if you're playing them across different chords, and in like a band setting where you have different people playing basically different things. It's less likely that you're going to hit something that's going to basically clash too dramatically, right? So that's one of the benefits of the pentatonic. It's also of course very easy to play because the shapes are going to be a lot. You would think it wouldn't be that much more simple with removing two notes, but actually you can see down here that those two notes kind of pop up a lot. So it actually does simplify the shape a lot if you just move it down to five notes. And with a five note construction, you can actually kind of think of some rules that you're going to have with a five note construction, and that is going to be that you never really have on the pentatonic scale the two notes right next to each other. So for example, if I look at this whole shape on the pentatonic, you don't see two greens a half step away from each other, right? This is a black one, not a green, right? You don't see two greens right next to each other, and you're not going to see more than two blank notes that you're going to be skipping, right? So you're always going to have an interval that is going to be either this interval skipping two notes or you're going to have an interval where it's skipping basically one note. So you can think about that as kind of like in the pentatonic shape, you can almost think about it as if the long shape or is it going to be basically the short shape. And if you finger that on the guitar, it works out quite nicely because if I look at this top one up top, I'm starting on position five. If you have the dots on the guitar, you'll have a dot one, two, three, four, five. And then the long shape is you have to grab it with your pinky over here. So now I'm going to fret five to eight. That's kind of difficult when you're starting out. But for a pinky grab, that's perfect because it fits your hand perfectly. So the idea of the guitar would be that you have the frets lined out and you want to be playing everything in position and every finger is kind of taking care of its own little location. Now I deviate from that a lot. Some people like to be very ergonomic and they're fingering and that's probably a good place to start. But then when you start messing around with it, you're going to be moving around depending on what you want to do. So any case. So you have this one. So you probably want to, if you're new to that practice like a hammer on to get that one to work out that pinky. Also note that when your thumb is too high up, it might be harder to grab than if you have your thumb lower back on the neck here. And then the shorter positions are going to be these positions and that should be really comfortable. Well, that's as comfortable as it gets, right? Basically going from your pointer finger to your ring finger. And then down here you've got a pinky position too, but this is usually a little bit easier to play down because you have more leverage, especially if your thumb is lower on the guitar. And that's usually this shape that most people learn. And you might get, I used to ask like, well, why do most people learn that shape? Like what is it about that shape? Because all the other shapes have the same notes in them. And from what I can, a couple of reasons that shape is really useful. One, it's in the middle of the guitar. So now it's in the middle of the guitar and I can expand and grow my shapes and learn my shapes back towards the back as well as towards the front of the guitar. That's the way you want to learn it because then you can kind of organically expand your knowledge there. Another reason is that it starts on an A, which is the minor relevant of the C. So that works really well to be playing in A minor, which has all the same notes as the C major. And so that's a very common scale to be playing in. So that works good, or you can play it in the C major, but the C is going to be this note over here. So you can play it in either C major or A minor. But most people are probably going to start to think of it as A minor because you're going to start fingering the position with that A note. So that's probably the easiest way to be thinking about what you're doing in A minor and start from there and then start targeting other types of notes. So that's another reason that I think it's a really useful position to start with. Another reason is that if you're playing in A minor you've got this open A string right here. So that open A string is really useful because you can kind of ring it out open even way down here. And that's useful. You also have your E position here and your E string is an open E string that's right above it as well if you were playing in like an E or an E minor. So for all those, and also in the blues guitar, they actually modify a lot of people like one way to think about blues guitar. And we won't get into this now, but it's just interesting to note is that they actually use this position one shape in kind of strange ways. So instead of thinking about a different scale, we kind of just think about this one shape in some ways you can think about it as looking at this one shape and augmenting it towards a blues kind of thing. The blues thing has dominant seven chords. It does some kind of weird stuff that you can learn kind of conventionally with this shape and then you can kind of get deeper into like what it's doing, which is actually quite confusing. So we might like that later. So then with the shape then, as far as learning the shape, what you're going to want to do is you could, I'm going to try to put this up top, learn it the way everybody's going to do it at first. It's just going to happen is to just finger the shape, right? Now a lot of people will be down on just finger in the shape from top to bottom because they say that that's not musical and learning it and you're just playing a shape and it's not, you're learning it like a rogue and it sounds like a scale and people will be saying that that's not cool or whatever. But everybody ends up doing that. So that's one thing that you can do is of course you can just play it up and down the neck and I'm trying to do alternate picking when I do it usually. So if you're trying to get good with the pick, you could try all down strokes if you're new to the pick. So I'm just doing just down strokes but then alternate picking down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. So I'm just alternating the down and up which is going to be faster with the picking and of course you do want to go back up to. So that's the first thing that you can do. You can do that while watching. You don't even need to pick. You can just use this hand and just once you got the finger in down to just run it up and down the guitar while you're watching Netflix or whatever you watch. I'm not promoting Netflix. I don't know. I like that one piece show. That was cool. But in any case, you could do so you can do that and then then also just I also just want to point out the name of this shape. So so when you're trying to say I'm going to play this shape, what are you what are you going to say what you could say I'm going to I'm playing a pentatonic shape on fret five and people will usually note that as fret as what your starting point will be fret five. So you can name it that way. You can also most people a lot of people will call it your one position. So you're going to play pentatonic position one in the key of like a minor or starting on fret five. Right. Or you can try to name this shape by using the caged system that we'll talk about later and say this is a G shape position. Some people will do that that that took a while for me to understand because I didn't see it that way before. But like the kid like here's your G shape right here within it. So that so so you can see that G shape. Now you wouldn't actually play that G shape normally because you'd have to borrow off these three over here. But you can see the G shape over here. It fits nicely into this shape. So we'll learn more about that in the caged system. But that's one way that you can anchor. You're not playing. If you played this chord you would be playing a C but you could see the shape is a C major shape. I mean a G major shape if it was an open position. And so we're trying to use those shapes that we all learn in open position to anchor ourselves as to what the shape is not only for that chord but the related pentatonic shape. Which will be unique to this position. But then also when we get to the major shape down here we can do the same thing. Now you have to be a little bit careful with that though because of course you have one problem of saying that you're using a G shape even though you're playing a C chord. So you have to keep that straight in your mind. But there's no there's no perfect way to say this stuff. People get say well I don't like that because you're not you're using the shape to say it's a C chord and you're saying G. But again there's there's no perfect way to do it. So the other issue that you have to keep in mind however is that when you apply that to the whole major chord construction down here. Then the G shape will fit in the G chord shape will fit in multiple major positions. Because we because we know that the one four five works as major chord construction. So if I started you know so if I started on like a G as my one chord and I was playing in G major the one four five position would have a G would fit into the shapes even though the entire chord shape would be different. Right we saw that when we went to when we did some of our movable shapes here. So you have to be kind of careful the fact that you see that this G shape fits inside of a major chord construction doesn't necessarily tell you that you're in position one right. But but so again it's not a perfect you got to kind of deal with those those kind of things. So that's going to be the naming convention. Now the next just tip when you're when you're learning this position is that is that you're going to you usually want to start to target an actual note in it. So and that's usually going to be the a minor. So we'll talk more about targeting a note in the position later. But when you start to play this more musically you're going to want to say like for example if I'm targeting that a there's an a here there's an a here. So here's an a and here's an a and here is an a. So there's three a's in this and this position and the open string if I is an a back here. So if I just selected that open string I would be in an a. So when you start noodling around you might end on that a it's quite common to try to noodle your position and end on this a which is nicely in the middle of the guitar. And that way you have a starting point and an ending point and you're going to start to sound more musical because you're actually doing something where you you know what you're doing as opposed to just just noodling around and you have no direction you don't know where it's going to go if you don't know where it's going to go then you can't you can't make tension and then release the tension intentionally. You'll start to learn to do that just by your ear. But if you if you target a note and the a is going to be the easiest note to do that basically playing then in a minor. Then you could say OK I'm in a minor now I'm going away from a minor and then see how I resolved on that note that takes me back to the a minor. So then you could start to get a little bit more musical trying to find ways that you can basically start and end on a note. Once you do that in the a minor you could do that with other notes to like the C up top like I could start playing not from this note but from here and start on a C and then end on a C. Here's a C down here so I could. Right and then I'm trying to make it resolve to basically a C. So the next thing that you want to do just musically would be instead of playing because if you play this just up and down all the time you'll end up in a situation where you where you don't even know. Like I don't know what to do down here like you might say well what I know this is this a half position or a whole position well in order to know that I have to play it from top to bottom. Oh OK there there it is but obviously you don't want to have to do that you don't want to have to go all the way back up to the top again and play it from top to bottom to know what to do down here right. So so you want to practice bits and pieces starting from different areas in the position. So instead of practicing and playing in the full position you might just select this top box and then see what you can do musically with that very limited amount just in terms of rhythm. So I'm doing a little bit of bending I'm doing a little bit of rhythm to it. I'm going to do some double stops two strings at the same time hammer on and then hammer on here is a perfect hammer on place. You can even experiment pulling in the open string so the string is open. It should work because I'm in the key of a minor although it might sound funny not because the e isn't in the a minor the a minor that we're working in but because we're in a completely different register we're a little too high up on the guitar for that really low base to ring out true sometimes. So you can kind of experiment experiment with that the open a same thing. I can play out that open a which is this string and work it in here. And I can work that in and that should sound good because I'm basically in the key of a but again it might sound lower than than the rest of the register that we're basically playing in. You can also imagine that you're moving to another shape and do and be like be doing this and then move up to that shape right as if you're going to be moving up here. Notice I'm taking my fingers off and playing them open sometimes as well. And then you might take like this three box notice that these are all the short all the all the short intervals and I'm going to start it's kind of useful to start to see this pentatonic shape like I say as the long intervals and the short intervals. So these three are the short intervals and then you got the two long intervals. And this this is not the same thing as saying as as like mapping out the the scale where we said where we said whole step whole step I'm not thinking the formula of whole step whole step half step. However, the shape what I'm saying what I'm looking at is the shape here is that there's the long shape and then the shorter shapes when you look at this pentatonic. And you can see they actually will follow each other like this these two long shapes at the bottom are going to be next to each other. And if you can get this bottom one correct the top one is the same. So there's actually only five unique strings on the guitar because the bottom guitar bottom string the top string repeat their different octaves but they're the same tone. So if you if you can understand this top string you already have the bottom string it's going to be the same. And then you just have to figure out the other the differences right so it's going to be these three are the are the are the small intervals and the long intervals with regards to your fingers. Right so if I play just in this little interval it's perfect for your finger. A lot of shape a lot of shapes that you can play you can start with this a or a lot of hammer-ons that you can do right I can start with this a. So notice I'm sliding up to that I'm not going to go out here because that but that slide is something that you can kind of work in there. Just know it will talk later about actual shapes in here. This is actually an a minor shape. I'm not going to get into it when I'm just noodling around what shapes are here but any comfortable shape will be some chord construction right so you can start to experiment like well what if I just held those three notes right there down. What does that sound what's that what's that sound so I can be noodling around. I can put my two fingers up here so now I'm basically playing this and then these two. I like that. Right and then you can kind of end off there that's a that's an a minor position but if you just noodling around you'll kind of find that just by ear and then of course you can go down to the bottom. I'm going to add this one because it's hard to do something just with those two long shapes right you can do rhythm stuff. So now I'm playing these three together so so and even when you're playing up and down on this you might do some. You might try to make it sound more musical I'm not even trying to be in in a in an a I'm just trying to do something that I think would be cool and notice that this shape right here. If you play like this note and and this note is a power chord so you can you can that's always good to play and all these notes are fair game. I like these three notes are fair game so you could. I like to shuffle between the power chord and then this C and by doing that you know that's kind of just an interesting basically shuffle pad. So now I'm ending on that A because I'm on the A to the A. So you could just kind of jam around in there and try to try to make it more musical that's another way to practice it. Now then what you want to do with this is start to connect it later to I'm going to unhide the cells to the open positions here. So and again the easiest way to do that is to think of yourself in an A minor but we'll talk about all of the chords that we did except possibly diminished. But we'll talk about all of the chords and see how we might be able to link that possibly to our position up top. So if you go to your nice nice friendly A minor down here then the question is well how can I lead up from my A minor to get into my position up top. So I could like just use this string and just and then I'm not just zoomed into this to this position right here and now I can be up here and be like OK. And then I'm going to end I'm targeting so now I'm zooming up to this note and then I'm going to target till I can just get back to that note which is in my pentatonic position. So I could be like so right and now I'm back to from an A minor to an A. And so and then if you're in the pentatonic question is how can I get back to that to my A back there. I could just jump back there right I can follow the string up to the position. This is an A to an A if I just or I'm sorry an A to a C and that gets me into the position right. You can also follow this string because that's going to be your open A. And so so you can always be jamming around here. A nice comfy A. And then how can I get back well I could just use that string. And then I'm just I'm just playing that string as I'm kind of zooming back or I can walk this string down. I could be on this string and then kind of walk it back. Remember when we were in open A I kind of like the shuffle pattern of just hope holding down this E which is just another way to play the A. But now I'm just holding down that E. And that's just I'm just staying all I'm doing is playing a minor basically and then just noodling around. I'm trying to find a way to get home from my open position into my pentatonic and when in pentatonic targeting the A. And I'm usually just targeting that. I just want to know around and then go home and then go home back home A open position. So those are some tips just to kind of memorize that position. We'll go into then more detail later talking about the intervals of this position a bit more. And then we'll try to tie out more specifically each of these chords to to into the pentatonic this pentatonic position that usually everyone everyone loves this pentatonic position. This is the main one oftentimes so we'll try to get the most utility out of it and take all these notes into that pentatonic position and then we'll later on then we'll add the the notes for the full major position adding the two other notes and talk about it.