Why does Minor Pentatonic fit everywhere?

[Mykola]

I am curious, why Minor Pentatonic is so universal. It fits over major chords, and the same tonic scale can even be used over every chord in blues progression. Theoretically, there should be too many clashes with the chord notes, but it sounds good.

So, is there a reasonable explanation for this?

[ColinO]

To me, the simple answer is that it doesn't work everywhere at least not that well. It can work over a blues shuffle because it's often ambiguous as to whether the chords are major or minor and the scale itself is kind of an extended arpeggio of the Im7 with an added 11th degree and IV9 with an added 11 and no 3. Even in a shuffle the minor pentatonic scale isn't great over the V imo although it does have three notes of the Vm7 and that is why you often hear players use the V pentatonic scale over that chord or they are at least careful about what notes of the I pentatonic scale they hang on.

I don't think it works well over the entire jazz blues progression although it can cover parts of it.

[docsteve]

I haven't worked out why, but I found that it works well over some of the more far-out turnarounds and subs. So the answer is probably that God created the minor pentatonic scale for us mere humans to fake our way through these.

Stephan

[Mykola]

Now, with some more information, I will state two hypotheses.
1) Minor pent sounds like extended chord arpedgio for many chords, at least our brain is trying to reconcile clashing sounds with the rest of the chord in this way. Hence, the 'bluesy' sound, but still it sounds right.
2) When using minor pent, we actually hear it as being in a key different from our blues progression. Because the most important pitches (I, IV and V) of both keys coincide, this combination sounds close enough to be pleasing, but far enough to seem unusual or 'bluesy'.

[matt.guitarteacher]

There's another thread about the fact that you can basically resolve any dominant chord to a tonic chord of basically any key. So, I would imagine that the "outside" notes are heard as dominant approaches of some kind and of course, inside is inside.

Minor thirds are a tremendously important organizing structure in jazz harmony generally, especially with dominant chords. That minor pentatonic is probably somewhat referencing that for the way you hear it. At least, that's what I would imagine you're kind of hearing.

[ColinO]

Just to be clear, are you talking about a jazz blues or a blues blues?

[matt.guitarteacher]

Forgot you're talking about blues. Blues isn't major/minor western functional harmony. Blues scale works throughout, regardless of the actual chords.

[ragman1]

I am curious, why Minor Pentatonic is so universal. It fits over major chords, and the same tonic scale can even be used over every chord in blues progression. Theoretically, there should be too many clashes with the chord notes, but it sounds good.

So, is there a reasonable explanation for this?

Because they produce 'acceptable' dissonances, or rather the dissonances fall in the 'right' places. There are no avoid notes. It's pretty good jazz theory!

Am pent: A C D E G

A7: root #9 sus4 5 b7
D7: 5 b7 root 9 sus4
E7: sus4 #5 b7 root #9

But mainly the notes of the minor-over-major imitate the sound of the human voice conveying emotional pain. That's really why it works.

[Binyomin]

This isn't exactly a "why," but the "wrong" notes are the "blue" notes: the flat third and seventh.

[matt.guitarteacher]

Here's how I see it: It's simply because our ears are used to it: jazz, and virtually all western pop music, is derived from african-american music, for which the use of minor pentatonic (AKA blues scale) is central. So if you grew up in "Western culture", you have become accustomed to that sound since before you took any interest in music theory. Any attempt to "music theorize" why it works is trying to put the cart before the horse. If you were a rock or blues guitar player before you got into jazz, most of your playing likely involved minor pentatonics over major triads, so that a more natural question might be "why does a major scale work over a major chord"! (For my taste, the further pop music strips itself of its african-american origins, the less it interests me. British prog-rock? ugh!)

FWIW I've seen on this forum claims in "theory" discussion that playing minor pentatonics over a maj7 chord is "wrong". It shows what goes wrong if one tries to apply ideas that might make sense in a elementary academic music theory context to an evolved and stylized music like jazz.

Good post.

The beginning of the discussion is kind of focused on why something which is basically blues melody works "over" these chords, and that's really kind of backwards. Blues melodies reference the blues scale primarily, and it's a modal nonfunctional thing, with respect to harmony. The harmony is basically after-the-fact. So the more appropriate question might be "Why do these CHORDS work 'over' blues?".

The really interesting thing about jazz is the way that we pull functional type HARMONIC usages FROM blues melody.

[Mykola]

What I am getting from this discussion is:
1) Blues originated as a purely melodic form based on minor pent/blues scale.
2) Then some illiterate beginner-level musician tried to harmonize it, probably with the only three chords that he knew (which happened to be major), and accidentally it worked, although produced unusual and very emotional sound.
Here, I have to add that some researchers say, that the 'sad' sound has a biological reason: hearing blue notes below the expected pitches is associated with the lower voice, which people tend to use when they are sad.
3) This new sound was at first considered unacceptable by the mainstream musicians, but gradually made its way through 'classical-oriented censorship', and everyone got used to it as being 'normal'.
4) Once this has been accepted, we are trying to justify the 'unfitting' scale from the traditional harmonic analysis standpoint, talking about extended chords and major/minor ambiguity, although nobody cared about all this when this genre was being created.
5) We can experiment and use the same approach with other 'not-so-suitable' scales and harmonies, gradually introducing listeners to them, and making them accept and view these combinations as aesthetically pleasing. Actually, we are already doing it in jazz. I noticed, that sophisticated jazz music is often perceived as sound garbage during first encounter, and there is a learning curve before you start truly enjoying it.

[dasein]

There's two explanations, depending on which perspective you look at it from:

- As others alluded to, the pentatonic scale (or something like it) has been discovered by a pretty wide variety of different musical cultures around the world. It has a lot of affinity with justly intoned intervals and the overtone series -- many people more qualified than me have written extensively on this. That's probably what gives it its stable, floating quality.

- Of course, we use the 12-tone equal tempered scale, so its relationship to just intonation and the overtone scale is more remote. But even in this approximation, it has one quality that makes it different from traditional major/minor scale harmony: no tritone. Without the tritone, the need for that dominant-tonic resolution is greatly diminished. It doesn't have the forward momentum of major/minor harmony. Again, it floats.

[KirkP]

A related question is: why are we attracted to pentatonic scales (whether major or minor) or why are they popular in multiple cultures. One reason is that they contain no half-step intervals and (as previously mentioned) no tritones. A room full of people playing random notes from a pentatonic scale will never have dissonance. That's the principle of wind chimes.

But, however complex their melodies, wind chimes are static so don't give you much to "tell a story" with and can quickly sound like the dreaded "noodling". So while I often use pentatonics on blues, I try not to dwell on the same one too long, or at least use chromatic approaches and bends to add some tensions.

[JonR]

What I am getting from this discussion is:
1) Blues originated as a purely melodic form based on minor pent/blues scale.
2) Then some illiterate beginner-level musician tried to harmonize it, probably with the only three chords that he knew (which happened to be major), and accidentally it worked, although produced unusual and very emotional sound.

Here's W C Handy (definitely a highly literate musician) in his own words (written in 1941), on his first encounter with the blues on Tutwiler railroad station in 1903:

“A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept... As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars.... His song, too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.”

“The primitive southern Negro, as he sang, was sure to bear down on the third and seventh tone of the scale, slurring between major and minor. Whether in the cotton field of the Delta or on the Levee up St. Louis way, it was always the same. Till then, however, I had never heard this slur used by a more sophisticated Negro, or by any white man. I tried to convey this effect... by introducing flat thirds and sevenths (now called blue notes) into my song, although its prevailing key was major..., and I carried this device into my melody as well... This was a distinct departure, but as it turned out, it touched the spot.

The three-line structure I employed in my lyric was suggested by a song I heard Phil Jones sing in Evansville ... While I took the three-line stanza as a model for my lyric, I found its repetition too monotonous ... Consequently I adopted the style of making a statement, repeating the statement in the second line, and then telling in the third line why the statement was made.”

Regarding the "three-chord basic harmonic structure" of the blues, Handy wrote "the (tonic, subdominant, dominant seventh) was that already used by Negro roustabouts, honky-tonk piano players, wanderers and others of the underprivileged but undaunted class from Missouri to the Gulf, and had become a common medium through which any such individual might express his personal feeling in a sort of musical soliloquy." He noted, "In the folk blues the singer fills up occasional gaps with words like 'Oh, lawdy' or 'Oh, baby' and the like. This meant that in writing a melody to be sung in the blues manner one would have to provide gaps or waits."

Handy published his first blues tune, Memphis Blues, in 1913, but had been beaten to it by Hart Wand and Lloyd Garrett's Dallas Blues the previous year.

Both composers may have been exaggerating their own contributions to the genre, of course, but it seems likely that they established the fixed 12-bar form, if not the three-major-chord harmonic structure; not just for ease of writing, but to provide a predictable repeated form for bands to follow. Handy seems quite clear that he was hearing "blue notes" - indeterminate between major and minor - and decided the only way to represent them in notation was to use a major key, but add flattened 3rd and 7th degrees. The flattened 3rd would typically alternate between minor and major, as an attempt to convey how the pitch moved. (Dallas blues features that mix too.)

The flattening of 3rd and 7th (and also the 5th occasionally) was variable, IOW, not fixed as minor. But the expression in the music comes from taking the major tonality and altering it in that way - the 3rd in particular.

In fact, "neutral 3rds" (indeterminate, or variable between minor and major) were noticed by English folk song collectors Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams, well before any possible American influence could have crossed the Atlantic. So it's not a uniquely American (or African) thing, but something that untrained folk singers - especially if unaccompanied - will do naturally, as a way of introducing expression into melodies. It seems to be a peculiarly European/classical perspective that sees "major" and "minor" as distinct tonalities, artificially fixed (which of course they have to be for the classical harmonic system to work).
I.e.., the development of tonality and functional harmony necessitated extremely tight restrictions on melodic material - not just in tuning, but in limiting scale types to major and minor (allowing a couple of occasional alterations in the latter). For harmony to take off, melody had to be held back. Melody was enslaved to harmony.

Here, I have to add that some researchers say, that the 'sad' sound has a biological reason: hearing blue notes below the expected pitches is associated with the lower voice, which people tend to use when they are sad.

Right. That probably lies behind the western perception of "major=happy/minor=sad", which is of course a crude simplification. Blues plays around between the two, having no cultural allegiance to the system which keeps them distinct.

3) This new sound was at first considered unacceptable by the mainstream musicians

Not really "unacceptable", only belonging to untrained folk musicians, and from a racially segregated underclass too. W C Handy (being black) was a useful bridge between that crude folk music and commercial popular music. Blues was hugely popular once it became mainstream (in the early 1920s thanks to audio recording), and only classical musicians would have looked down on it, as of course they tend to look down on all popular forms.

4) Once this has been accepted, we are trying to justify the 'unfitting' scale from the traditional harmonic analysis standpoint, talking about extended chords and major/minor ambiguity, although nobody cared about all this when this genre was being created.

Right.

Jazz is to blame somewhat through its (post-bebop, post Duke) obsession with harmonic complexity. Early jazz was happy enough with 3-chord blues - and the subtly vocalised expression of horn improvisations - but 3 chords weren't nearly enough for the beboppers!
Pianists have a lot of answer for too, attempting to make a virtue out of their necessity of sticking to equal temperament: (a) they can't bend notes! and (b) they have too many notes at their disposal! "Look, I can use 10 fingers to play one chord!"

5) We can experiment and use the same approach with other 'not-so-suitable' scales and harmonies, gradually introducing listeners to them, and making them accept and view these combinations as aesthetically pleasing. Actually, we are already doing it in jazz. I noticed, that sophisticated jazz music is often perceived as sound garbage during first encounter, and there is a learning curve before you start truly enjoying it.

True. The more "sophisticated" it is, the smaller the potential audience, and the longer it takes to get an audience to understand/appreciate it. And the fact jazz is always evolving and moving on means that the time the audience has got it, the musicians are into the next avant garde development.

Add to that the focus on advanced improvisation at the expense of catchy melodies or dance rhythms, and it's easy to appreciate why the average listener (non-jazz aficionado) hears it as just streams of notes with no "tune". It doesn't help, of course, that European classical concert culture outlawed improvisation, or that most people regard music as something only "talented" people can actually do. Jazz (like blues) was once as democratic as any popular music, but we can't really blame jazz musicians for wanting to develop their craft regardless of popular acceptance (poisoned as that is by commercial pressures). It's not their fault that our society habitually sees "Art" and "Entertainment" as two different things.

[KirkP]

Great discussion!

Going back to the original topic, I've listened to a lot of early blues and pre-blues, and it's never seemed to me the minor pentatonic or "blues scale" were a good approach to capture the spirit. The bends from 9 to #9 (b3) and from 6 to #6 (b7) are essential to me, and missing from the minor pentatonic.

[medblues]

In a fretted guitar, it is technically very difficult to flatten a tempered major third down to a natural (just) major third whereas one can bend a minor third up to a natural third. Would this be supporting the use of minor pentatonic by many genres ?

[KirkP]

In a fretted guitar, it is technically very difficult to flatten a tempered major third down to a natural (just) major third whereas one can bend a minor third up to a natural third. Would this be supporting the use of minor pentatonic by many genres ?

Approaching a chord tone from a half-step below often makes for good melody, even if the first note isn't in the key. You can either fret each note or bend up if that sounds better to you. I try to emulate how vocalists bend notes for expression.

Edit: After rereading your question, I realize I answered something different! I think you asked if bending could help correct for the small difference between the natural 3rd and tempered 3rd. I guess it could, but I think the main use is to emulate the expression of a wind instrument or voice.
But since the fretboard is based on equal temperament, it's true that a fretted third is a bit sharper that a "just" third, so if you want to hear a just third, bending up from the b3 is one way to do it.

[JonR]

Great discussion!

Going back to the original topic, I've listened to a lot of early blues and pre-blues, and it's never seemed to me the minor pentatonic or "blues scale" were a good approach to capture the spirit. The bends from 9 to #9 (b3) and from 6 to #6 (b7) are essential to me, and missing from the minor pentatonic.

Of course. The minor pentatonic is a crude approximation of what "blues scale" actually is.
In any case, it's understood that when playing blues, you bend out of (and into) the minor pent. Just as you'd bend the m3 up towards M3 on the tonic, you can easily bend up to the m3 from the 2 below, or from 6 to b7. Nobody says you can only play the notes in the minor pent! That's just the foundation, a kind of average set of pitches.
So, in a sense, you are playing a mix of major and minor pents, or mixolydian and dorian, with added b5 (1-2-b3-3-4-b5-5-6-b7), but it gravitates to the minor pent - or something like it. Blues scale doesn't have 9 notes! (Unless maybe you're piano player...) It has 5; but most of them are movable, and/or open to embellishment - and always in a dialogue with the chords.

The later electric Chicago blues did seem to make more use of something closer to minor pent, and it would be that style of blues that was the main influence on rock music. But I agree there was lots of other subtle stuff going on in earlier blues - often tending more towards major than minor.

[marcwhy]

I am curious, why Minor Pentatonic is so universal. It fits over major chords, and the same tonic scale can even be used over every chord in blues progression. Theoretically, there should be too many clashes with the chord notes, but it sounds good.

So, is there a reasonable explanation for this?

The secrets are revealed here: Pentatonic Khancepts: Book & CD: Steve Khan: 9780757994470: Amazon.com: Books

[Thumpalumpacus]

Great discussion!

Going back to the original topic, I've listened to a lot of early blues and pre-blues, and it's never seemed to me the minor pentatonic or "blues scale" were a good approach to capture the spirit. The bends from 9 to #9 (b3) and from 6 to #6 (b7) are essential to me, and missing from the minor pentatonic.

... one reason I love using Dorian in a blues ...

[TOMMO]

These things are both bluesy but they are more sophisticated than a lot of blues that came after them. Put another way, as a kid who loved Howlin' Wolf and Robert Johnson, it was a bit of a surprise to later learn that much earlier blues sounded more, well, advanced / developed.

I don't think it's a matter of "early" and "later" but much more a matter of urban sophisticated/educated and more rural, mostly self taught msuicians who picked up the blues as a developed song form (which itself developed from "folk" songs and song forms) and in return made it their own again.

There's a very interesting book on the earliest blues:

[FuseHead]

I used to experiment all the time just taking random notes out of the major scale. Amazing how many places such modes work where they really shouldn't. So my take on it? The more notes you take out of a scale and play it as an arpeggio, the more it works over typically unassociated chords, the more notes you take out , the more typically unassociate-able chords it works over. I'd came across things that worked all the time that just made me scratch my head.

[Mykola]

The secrets are revealed here: Pentatonic Khancepts: Book & CD: Steve Khan: 9780757994470: Amazon.com: Books

Thanks! But could you briefly answer the question why minor pent is so universal (based on this book)? Kind of summarize its main ideas?

[Mykola]

I used to experiment all the time just taking random notes out of the major scale. Amazing how many places such modes work where they really shouldn't. So my take on it? The more notes you take out of a scale and play it as an arpeggio, the more it works over typically associated chords, the more notes you take out , the more typically associate-able chords it works over. I'd come across things that worked all the time that just made me scratch my head.

So, we can state the requirements for a scale's universal applicability:
1) it has to have few notes - the fewer, the better (to some point, of course )
2) notes should be distributed kind of evenly throughout the octave, at least not clustered
3) no combination of two notes should create a diminished 5th interval

The effects of using such a scale would be:
A) we get an impression of playing arpeggio with some extended chord tones (roughly equals the concept of arpeggio substitution).
B) "wind chimes" type sonority between scale notes can camouflage some clashes with chord notes.

[FuseHead]

The more notes you take out, the more arp it becomes naturally. Of course with that said you can really arp out any scale no matter how many notes you leave including all notes being left in the scale in depending on how you organize your runs as far as note groupings are concerned.

PS: I edited my post above as I meant to type typically un-associated chords. I think auto correct rared it's ugly head because it did again when I edited it.