From Chuck Berry to Eric Clapton and Slash, every player uses the minor pentatonic – here’s how you can leverage the guitar’s most-used scale in your own playing

It contains just five notes and yet the minor pentatonic scale has been central to countless classic riffs, licks and solos over the decades. The beauty of the scale lies in its simplicity – play an A minor pentatonic scale over an A minor chord and you'll be playing the root note (A), the minor 3rd alternatively named b3 (C), a 4th (D), the 5th (E) and the minor 7th, also named b7 (G). That gives you three strong notes derived directly from the A minor chord (A, C, E) and two colour notes, the 4th (D) and b7 (G).

Below is a fretboard diagram of A minor pentatonic using its most popular shape on the fretboard: there are five different minor pentatonic shapes and this is shape 1.