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Essential Music Theory  How to build musical scales

Major pentatonic scale

Starting with A major we have produced two tables showing which notes are taken from the full A major scale to create the major pentatonic scale.

Figure 15. Notes and intervals of A major scale.   (Enlarge)

Figure 15. Notes and intervals of A major scale.

Figure 16. Notes and intervals of A major pentatonic scale.   (Enlarge)

Figure 16. Notes and intervals of A major pentatonic scale.

As we can see from our table above, the major pentatonic scale only uses these notes from the A major scale:

1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th

Next: Minor pentatonic scale