E Minor Pentatonic Scale on Resonator Guitar

Play the E Minor Pentatonic scale on Resonator Guitar with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Minor Pentatonic scale has 5 notes per octave and belongs to the pentatonic family.

All 3 of Resonator Guitar's open strings fall inside E Minor Pentatonic — G (the flat 3rd), B (the 5th), D (the flat 7th) — though E itself has to be stopped. Open, the strings cover G2 to D4.

Gritty, bluesy, and direct — five notes with no half steps, so each one lands with attitude over a minor or dominant chord. The sound of rock and blues lead playing.

Heard in: Blues, rock, hard rock, metal, funk, and soul solos — the first scale most lead players learn and the one they never leave.

It has a metal cone instead of a soundboard, which is where the volume and the bark come from. Every position is a straight bar or a short declared slant over the open-G strings; a chord no bar shape spells is marked, not charted.

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 E Minor Pentatonic scale to the chords it harmonizes and to progressions in the key of E 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.