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A complaint many guitar players have about their improvisational skills is that they often feel like they are trapped in the dreaded ‘box’. This means that they find themselves using the same scale patterns over and over again, finding it hard to play across the whole fret-board.

The reasons for this is simple, if you only practice one kind of pattern then you’ll never know other ways in which to play. That’s why it’s important to practice scales in as many different ways as possible. This will give you the freedom to move all over the fret-board.

Below you’ll find two halves of an extended pentatonic scale pattern in the key of A Minor. To play these in a different key, just shift the patterns along the fretboard as usual. I encourage you to seek out different patterns to practice and even to make up your own.