B Major Pentatonic on the Flamenco Guitar

Where B Major Pentatonic lies on the fretboard of a guitar tuned EADGBE, and how a flamenco passage lands it on the count.

B Major Pentatonic runs 5 notes to the octave, laid across an EADGBE fretboard with every B marked — the pitch a phrase keeps coming home to.

Open, sunny, and hard to play wrong — with no half steps there is nothing to clash, so every note sits comfortably over a major chord. Warm, folksy, and singable.

Heard in: Country, bluegrass, folk, gospel, Southern rock, and countless pop hooks — from "Amazing Grace" to "My Girl".

On the flamenco guitar a scale is the raw material of the falseta — a composed melodic passage the guitarist drops between sung verses — and of the runs a toque answers the cante with.

Whatever notes a passage runs through, it is measured in compás: it sets off and comes to rest where the count of the palo allows, so every scale here is finally heard against a cycle of accents.