Den pentatone boksen : el-gitaristens beste venn eller en begrensende faktor ved kreativt arbeid?

Abstract

In this article I want to present and discuss the pentatonic box, which consists of five main positions on the guitar neck, and look at various possibilities and challenges with the box as a starting point when playing electric guitar. Both as a guitarist and guitar teacher, I have an ambivalent relationship with the pentatonic box: On one hand, it has given me a feeling of fairly quick technical mastery and direct access to much of the well-known electric guitar literature, especially in the tradition of blues, rock and pop in the Western world. But at the same time, box-thinking has sometimes given me a bit of a “straitjacket feeling,” when I have experienced a lack of creative work and have rather stuck to familiar pentatonic scales and licks. Over a number of years, I have had guitar students who have also felt a bit stuck in the use of the pentatonic scale and the box-system on the electric guitar, and I have also had interviews and recorded some of the music from the lessons. So with this text, I want to show some of the steps I have taken to meet some of these challenges. My main research question is: How to detach oneself from the pentatonic box-system and expand the pentatonic landscape?