Memorization exercises
of the pentatonic scales
The series of exercises that we will perform in these pages are designed to increase your knowledge of the fingerings in different positions. While in the previous page, we worked on one fingering at a time, now we will work on pairs of fingerings. The difficulty comes from the fact that, playing in double positions, you need to think about two fingerings at the same time. The scope is to use the entire keyboard of the instrument as if it were just a large pentatonic scale.
We will use exercise 1 as an example: follow closely the indications and memorize the procedure, which is similar for all the other exercises.
Exercise #1
In the first exercise we will work in box 1 and box 2 in Am, in a very intuitive way. Play box 1 in ascending fashion (from the 6th string to the 1st), play box 2 descending (from 1st to 6th). Something very important in these exercises is that we won't always make reference to the root as the starting note, but rather on the lowest note in the ascending fingering, or highest in the descending fingering.
Performing is therefore very logical. Start from the lowest note of box 1 (G), climb to the first string up to the highest note of the box 1 (A). Move to box 2, starting from the highest note (C) then go down to the lowest note (A) of box 2, after that the cycle is restarted. There should be no rests in the change between one box and the other. Once you understand the system, its best to play with the aid of the metronome until memorization. The use of alternate picking is mandatory.
Exercise #2
In the second exercise we reverse the ascending and descending senses of the fingerings. Therefore start from the highest note of box 1, going down to the lowest. In box 2 you climb from the lowest up to the highest, and then it's restarted. Always in tempo and with alternate picking.
Once you have perfectly learned the system, you can play the entire series of exercises that follow, where the various boxes of the pentatonic scales are crossed depending on the directives of each exercise. Be aware of the fact that some of these exercises can be quite complicated, mostly because there can be fingerings that are quite spread out.
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In the next page we will work on horizontal pairs of strings.
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