Over the last few weeks I've been committing the Am pentatonic scales to memory, so far so good, got positions 1 to 4 nailed
I managed two of those positions before I got myself baffled by too many dots. I also looked at the CAGED system and thought
too many dots.
Much simpler for me was this method, which i call the
cap and pan...
A pentatonic scale over two strings; blue is the cap, green is the pan.
Major root (Ionian) is at the end of the pan handle and at the back of the cap.
minor root (Aoilian) is in the bottom of the pan and on the front of the cap (where a minor's lamp would be).
The shape just repeats on the octaves of the next pair of strings. Two sets of five dots is so much easier for me to visualise on the neck.
Once i'd learned it this way I only had to add two more dots to the shapes to get out of just playing pentatonic scales and actually understanding what modes are.
