Writing Song Melodies That Use Pentatonic Scales

Download “The Essential Secrets of Songwriting” E-book Bundle, and become a top-level songwriter!
__________________

Most songs are written in a major or minor key, and the scales for those keys use seven notes, not counting any altered tones. A pentatonic scale uses only five notes per octave. There’s a tendency to think of pentatonic scales as somewhat simplistic, and possibly even limiting, but melodies based on these scales can be beautiful, and there are some important benefits that songwriters should be aware of.

Though any 5-note scale is, by definition, pentatonic, the most commonly used ones are scales that don’t use semitones:

G Pentatonic: G A B D E

Before you think that melodies written using a pentatonic scale are going to sound like children’s songs (“Old MacDonald Had a Farm” uses a pentatonic melody) or a folksong/church song (“Amazing Grace”), “The Show Goes On” by Lupe Fiasco uses the notes of a pentatonic scale (G pentatonic) as the material for its chorus.

Major scales have two adjacent semitones. In G major, they are B to C, and F# to G. We create a standard pentatonic scale simply be removing the lower note of each semitone pair.

There are many reasons songwriters should try experimenting with pentatonic scales to construct song melodies:

1. Pentatonic melodies offer increased chord progression choices. The more you eliminate notes that need to be harmonized, the more you increase the number of potential chords that will harmonize the melody.
2. Pentatonic melodies are easy to sing. There’s a good reason why a lot of folk songs and children’s songs use pentatonic melodies: they’re relatively easy to sing.
3. Pentatonic melodies have an “indefinable charm”. Don’t you love sitting at a piano and strum your fingers along all the black notes? Those black notes, taken together, give you a Gb pentatonic scale. And there’s something quite captivating about it.
4. Pentatonic melodies are somewhat easy to create. It’s easy to improvise a pentatonic melody over a set chord progression, because you don’t have to worry about what to do with the leading tone or the tricky 4th note of a major scale.

Just because your melody is based on a pentatonic scale doesn’t mean that your chord choices will have to avoid the 4th or 7th notes. In other words, your chord progression can be solidly in major while your melody is pentatonic.

In fact, that’s the situation with “The Show Goes On”, which uses all sorts of leading tones and 4ths in its chorus chords:

G  D/F#  Em  G/D  C  G/D…

If improvising melodies in pentatonic is new to you, try as a first step creating melodies at the piano using only the black notes. It’s easy, and you’ll also likely find that chords will come easily as well: play isolated bass notes chosen similarly from the black notes, and make note of the combinations that “work.”

There are no “rules” about using pentatonic scales, of course. You can create melodies that use major or minor scales for the verse, and switch to pentatonic for the chorus.

____________