Expand Your Guitar Soloing Vocabulary With Pentatonic Scale Licks

One of the most important tasks that you face as an improvising guitarist is to massively expand your soloing vocabulary. And a great way of doing that is by memorizing new guitar licks on a regular basis.

In this guitar scale lesson we’ll look at two cool sounding licks that make use of the following two scales…

• Major Pentatonic Scale
• Minor Pentatonic Scale

One of my favorite things to do is to mix up these two types of scales within the same pentatonic scale lick. Why? Well…to my ears, mixing the two scales gives a really cool bluesy sound to the lick. And that’s always a cool thing!

Here are the two scales that we’ll use for the pentatonic licks in this lesson…

And let’s now take a look at the two guitar licks that use these pentatonic scales…

Pentatonic Guitar Lick #1:

 This guitar lick mainly uses 1/16th notes. This is when you play four evenly-spaced notes per beat. I’ve also used hammer-ons and pull-offs to give the lick a nice flowing sound.

Pentatonic Guitar Lick #2:

 Like the first lick, this one makes extensive use of 1/16th note rhythms. Notice also the cool sounding rhythmic pattern that I used for the second half of the lick. This gives the guitar lick quite a funky flavor.

That’s all from me for now. After you’ve mastered the above two licks, spend some time making up your own pentatonic scale licks. Making your own licks up will help you develop your own unique style of guitar soloing. And that’s always a good thing!

If you are serious about improving your soloing ability by discovering how to truly master guitar scales, then be sure to find out more about the Guitar Scale Mastery membership website. If you are willing to practice hard, I think it would help you a lot.