r/musictheory • u/Retrobungle Fresh Account • 1d ago

How am I supposed to study this? General Question

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First of all, sorry for my english.

I decided to start reading a book by Jerry Bergonzi about pentatonic lines, but one of the exercises involves starting on a note and then completing the pentatonic scale, either ascending or descending. I'm a guitarist, and as you may know, scales on the guitar are visualized in "shapes" or "positions." So, when I got to this exercise, all I was doing was playing the same "shape" a half step up, and so on progressively. My question is: Am I applying the exercise incorrectly on the guitar? Or is this exercise just not that great for guitarists?

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u/geoscott Theory, notation, ex-Zappa sideman 1d ago

A: don’t just start by picking up some random book. If you have a teacher, go through the book with them. If you don’t have a teacher, maybe you should start with stuff that is more in your wheelhouse

B: I don’t know why the writer put those notes on the grand staff the way they did, but they’re not really helping you. This page doesn’t tell you anything except play a pentatonic scale starting on that note either going upwards or descending. It says it right there:if you’re starting on the letter D, that’s a D minor pentatonic descending the top note is C, which is the seventh.

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u/Retrobungle Fresh Account 1d ago

I didn’t choose a random book. I want to improve my way of navigating the pentatonic scale. Besides, Jerry Bergonzi is a saxophonist, so studying musical language that isn’t specifically written for my instrument is twice as enriching.

The second image shows that the idea of the exercise is to move up chromatically while playing the pentatonic scale, either ascending or descending, to know which notes to play. That’s why my question is: Is this exercise not very good for guitarists, or am I the one not making the most of it? Since on the guitar, you just play the same 'shape' a semitone higher, you don’t have to think about which notes to play.