Musical Progress

2018 is shaping up to be a year where I make some decisive improvement in my grasp of musical theory and proficiency in playing the guitar. I've began with the minor pentatonic scale which the beginning point for everybody and have been practising consistently. I've found Pinterest to be quite useful in providing musical diagrams as shown below:

I've since moved on to the minor blues scale which is just the minor pentatonic with an extra note added, as shown below:

Taking the G minor pentatonic scale as an example (that's the one shown in the first diagram), we have the following five note sequence from one G to the next octave: 

G - Ab - A - Bb - B - C - Db - D - Eb - E - F - F# - G

For the G minor blues scale (shown above), we have the following six note sequence from one G to the next (a C# is added):

G - Ab - A - Bb - B - C - Db - D - Eb - E - F - F# - G

The ratio of one note's frequency to the next note's frequency is constant which leads to some interesting mathematics. I won't deal with that here because I realised I haven't put the necessary code into this blog's template, instead I discuss it in my mathematical blog.

The notes of the pentatonic scale can be remembered in a variety of ways and one way is to draw on the circle of fifths for help. The circle of fifths is represented as follows:

Let's look at the Gm on the inner rim of the circle. All of the notes of the minor pentatonic scale for G can be found by starting here and moving outward to the next note Bb then across to C, back to inside Dm and out to F. This gives G, Bb, C, D, F. Let's try with the scale for Am. Using the same route we get A, C, D, E, G. Again with Em, we get E, G, A, B, D.