Blues Minor

The missing fifth

Every other rotation of this pentatonic contains a perfect fifth above its root. This one does not, and the difference is audible immediately. Without that interval the root is asserted rather than supported, and the scale sounds unmoored in a way the minor pentatonic never does.

What sits there instead is the flat sixth, a half step above the fifth that is not present. The tension of the scale comes entirely from that substitution, and it is why the name attaches the word blues to a set of notes that contains no blue note in the usual sense.

Man Gong and the Chinese system

The alternative name comes from the Chinese five-tone system, where the anhemitonic pentatonic is rotated exactly as it is in Western practice and each rotation carries its own name. Man Gong is one of those names, and the scale is a standard mode there rather than an exotic import.

This is worth knowing for the same reason the Japanese pentatonics later in this family are worth knowing: the set is genuinely shared across traditions, and the Western names are one naming scheme among several for the same intervals.

How it is used

The minor blues scale works over minor chords where a flat sixth is already in the harmony — minor sixth-flat chords, Aeolian vamps, and the darker end of modal writing. Over an ordinary minor seventh chord the flat sixth is a strong colour rather than a safe note, so it wants placing rather than running.

Film and game scores use it where the minor pentatonic would be too familiar. The absent fifth removes the folk-rock association that the ordinary shape carries.

Confusions and neighbours

The commonest error is reading the name as a variant of the blues scale. It is not: the blues scale is a six-note set with a flat fifth, and this is a five-note rotation with a flat sixth and no fifth. The names are close and the sounds are not.

Its neighbours are the four other rotations. Compared from the same root, the minor pentatonic differs from it by one note — the fifth against the flat sixth — and that single note is the whole distance.

Frequently asked questions