These 5 Notes Will Change Any Piano Player’s Life

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A musician’s journey is made up of continual effort and dedication. It can sometimes feel like a slow grind, slogging through scales and chords and drilling endless exercises to get your muscle memory to perform instinctively. But a musician’s journey is also made up of big ‘aha’ moments where something just clicks, and your knowledge and expressive ability opens up.

For me, one of these moments happened when I understood how to use just 5 special notes to open my improvisational/soloing palette wide open. These 5 notes make up a scale called the ‘pentatonic scale’ and they changed my musical life, and how I play with other musicians. I hope they change yours too!  

Here are the notes you need to make a pentatonic scale, regardless of key. I (root), iii, IV, V, and vii. That’s it. If you apply this formula of notes to the key of C, you get C, Eb, F, G, and Bb. Try running this scale up and down a few times over top of some 7th chords to get an idea of its bluesy sound. 

If you’re looking to add even more bluesy goodness to your sound, try adding in a flat 5 in between the 4 and the 5. This note is often called the blue note, and when you play it in a pentatonic scale, you’ll see why!  I like to think of the blue note as the closest a piano player can get to bending notes like a guitar player. You can use it to blend the notes between the 4th and 5th, creating highly expressive lead lines for soloing and improvising.  

The pentatonic scale is one of those piano concepts that just begs to be experimented with.  You can practice it like any other scale, but never be afraid to get expressive with it and use it to great music all your own! Since it’s one of the main scales used in blues music, try playing with 7th chords built off of the I, the IV and the V as your chordal backdrop to improvise over.  

But the beauty of this scale is its versatility: it can be used over countless chord progressions. Have fun making music with the amazing scale!

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Jordan Leibel is passionate about songwriting, improvisation, and helping you become a creative musician! He’s worked as a composer for film, commercial, and theatre projects as well as a session musician and producer for recording work.