Guitar: A Minor Pentatonic Over the Changes

A Minor Pentatonic runs 5 notes to the octave, laid out here on EADGBE with every A flagged. Mid-chorus the pattern is not what you need; where the root is when the chord changes underneath you is.

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.

A guitar chorus is a single line with the comp dropped, so a scale here is what the picking hand walks through between the two or three phrases it actually meant to play.

Play it slowly against the audio until it stops being a shape, then put it over two bars of a form and let the chord tones decide which of the notes you actually keep.