Pentatonic scale fingerings -- Major and minor

[Bob]

Anyone got a list?

[Bob]

Come on.  I know you've got them.  Post them here please.

[jlh]

https://www.markhenri.com/music/piano_fingering.html

I am by no means advocating this particular set of fingerings.  In fact I disagree with some of them personally, but check it out -- you may find some gems somewhere on that page...

[pianonut]

bob, you should post this in the humor section.  you always make me laugh.  but, i know you're partly serious.  i mean, do people really play 12312 with rh?  why not play 13413?  just made it up now.  but, when you go to play the next one chromatically higher - it doesn't work so well in the sharp keys.  you have to adjust a lot of stuff. c# would probably be 23123...

[goose]

Hi Bob,

Randy Halberstadt's 'Metaphors for the Musician' has an excellent chapter on pentatonic usage. He also suggests thinking of the fingering as a 123 and 1234 group over TWO octaves instead of 123 12 over one octave.

And, yes, I'm going to keep mentioning Halberstadt's book until everyone who's interested in playing jazz piano goes out and gets a copy. And, no, I don't work for Sher Music.

Best,
Goose

[bachs_homegurl]

I'll get the book asap!! All i'm interested in is jazz. Thanx for the tip and now you don't have to keep mentioning it. 

miriam

[Bob]

Any more ideas?

This is serious.  I wasn't joking about it.  I wonder what fingerings other people are using.  Maybe mine are just awkward.

speaking of which....

[lostinidlewonder]

I think you have to have a flexible fingering for Pentatonic Scales, that means be able to play them in many ways. Like in classical music when we learn the scales we are asked to always start at the Root and go from there, I would suggest when doing any Jazz scale that you also attempt to discover fingers starting from different positions of the scale and treating them as the root.

So for instance. Lets look at C major Pentatonic which has CDEGAC

You can play going up like this
1) CDEGA CDEGA ...

You should determine how to also play it
2) DEGAC DEGAC ..
3) EGACD EGACD ..
so on

each one will encourage different fingers, especially when we start having black notes introduced. You need this flexilbilty in the scale so that the choices you make in improvisations are made easier, rather than always having to start at the root, know how to move into a scale from other positions.

[Hamfast]

why not 12345 ? simply

[Bob]

12345?  Are you serious?    You mean do a 'thumb under' to cross under the fifth finger?

[Hamfast]

no problem

[Hamfast]

if you can't, try 12123, 13134, or 13123 best of luck!

[ted]

I use set fingerings for the more common playing forms. However, once chords and scales get beyond the basic, that is to say I'm often creating them as I go along, it seems to me that, unless the position is really awkward, memorised prior determination of fingering is largely more trouble than it is worth.

Lostinidlewonder's point about stopping the habit of thinking of any playing form in one position, I consider most important for improvisation and playing generally. It is just as easy to think of a chord or scale as a usable subset to select from "at a glance", as it were, and continually varying the way its component notes are used.  It doesn't take long to develop this mode of thought. It's not difficult and the rewards in terms of variety of expression are well worth the trouble taken.

As to fingering, I do in fact often use all five fingers spontaneously and equally - hardly ever in the same way twice though. Admittedly I do use the "microsleep" trick very often. It is harder to play continuous, rapid runs and figures than the same things with even one note omitted, no matter how tiny the gap. So if important events in one hand are made to coicide with microsleeps in the other, everything is a lot easier (I'm talking about improvisation, not playing written pieces of course), and rhythmic impulse is heightened considerably.  What may initially seem a cheap trick is actually a pretty fertile source of ideas at the piano.

[Bob]

What is microsleep?

[ted]

The word actually means a very brief sleep, but I use it metaphorically here to mean the absence of one note in an otherwise continuous figure of rapid notes. It has the dual function of providing a physical rest, convenience of note grouping and often lending musical point to the phrasing. In fact many examples of it occur in written piano music derived from actual playing rather than mental composition - Sospiro would be a case in point - lots of it in that one.

The essentially pianistic device may have a proper musical name which I don't know.

It relates to your question in that all these fancy scales and chords are rarely played in uniform note streams anyway, hence detailed working out of optimal fingering is unnecessary.