A Minor Pentatonic Sliding Exercise 1

In this guitar lesson we’ll be looking at a fun exercise designed to…

Help you improve your ability to visualise the notes of the A minor pentatonic scale on the B-string and thin E-string.
Improve your ability to slide fluently with your first finger.
Develop your ability to do economy picking using upstrokes.
Improve your eighth note triplet timing.

Before we jump into the actual exercise, let’s first take a look at a preparation exercise…

Preparation Exercise: Played at 60 BPM

Preparation Exercise: Played at 120 BPM

When you can play this exercise from memory in a fluent way, then you’re ready to tackle the main exercise for this lesson…

If you look at the TAB of the exercise below for a couple of minutes, you might notice a number of things…

It uses a three note melodic pattern that uses the notes that you memorised in the preparation exercise.
All the sliding is done with the first finger.
The vast majority of the picking in the exercise is done with upstrokes. When you play these pairs of upstrokes, it can be very helpful to use a rest stroke for the upstroke on the thin E-string. To execute this rest stroke, you’ll need to allow the pick to come to rest on the underside of the B-string, immediately after picking the E-string.
Most of the notes in the exercise use eighth note triplet timing. This means that you’ll need to play three evenly-spaced notes per beat.
I’ve ended the exercise on an A power chord, which has the chord symbol A5. (Side Note: Be sure that you pay close to the TAB of the chord, as I’ve used a slightly unorthodox chord voicing). 🙂

A Minor Pentatonic Sliding Exercise 1: Played at 60 BPM

A Minor Pentatonic Sliding Exercise 1: Played at 120 BPM

I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Practising the exercise on a regular basis will have you gliding up and down the neck in no time.

Have fun!