Yeah, it’s a mouthful, but this scale is used by everybody. It doesn’t have a legal name, (at least I don’t think it does), but it’s what happens when you combine the most common version of the Blues Scale (the Minor Pentatonic with the passing b5):
with its Country/Bluegrass cousin (the Major Pentatonic with the passing b3):
The result is the hybrid Blues/Funk/Rock/Country Scale:
As you can see, this thing is just three notes short of a chromatic scale! (And the fact is, those remaining three notes tend to be used constantly as passing notes – so what can I say!) Still, it’s one of those structures that every good Blues, Funk, Rock and Country player knows inside and out, and that’s because it can be perceived as either a Blues Scale or a Country Scale with ‘additions’. This means that all of your current licks (whether ‘blues’ or ‘country’) will work like a charm except now you have a bigger palette to work from. Let’s listen to a few examples.
(This is blues, funk, rock, country folks. I didn’t include written notation here on purpose. If you want to learn these, use your ear – it’s the way it’s been done in this music since time immemorial. Slow ‘em down if you have to, but listen to the sounds, relate them to actions on the fretboard and internalize them.)
Lick 1
Lick 2
Lick 3