G Major Pentatonic Scale on 12-String Guitar

Play the G Major Pentatonic scale on 12-String Guitar with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Major Pentatonic scale has 5 notes per octave and belongs to the pentatonic family.

12-String Guitar's tuning sits inside this one: all 5 open courses are scale tones and one of them is G itself — E (the 6th), A (the 2nd), D (the 5th), G (the root), B (the 3rd). Open-course drones cost nothing here. Open, the courses cover E2 to E4.

Open, sunny, and hard to play wrong — with no half steps there is nothing to clash, so every note sits comfortably over a major chord. Warm, folksy, and singable.

Heard in: Country, bluegrass, folk, gospel, Southern rock, and countless pop hooks — from "Amazing Grace" to "My Girl".

12-String Guitar is strung in six courses of two, the lower four paired an octave apart, so each stopped note here sounds as two — which is why the shape rings thicker than the same grip on a single-strung instrument.

Each position shows the scale notes and their intervals from the root so you can connect the shape to its sound, hear it with audio playback, and practice it in any register. Movable patterns let you transpose the same fingering to other keys once it is learned.

Once a position is under your fingers, link the G Major Pentatonic scale to the chords it harmonizes and to progressions in the key of G to start improvising and writing with it. Working a scale alongside its chords is the fastest way to make it stick and to hear how it colors a progression.