The Secret Note Behind Santana’s Melodic Soloing

Ajouté : 2026-05-04

[00:00:07]Carlos Santana has this way of making even the simplest phrases sound very emotional and melodic. And part of that magic comes from one particular note that he adds to the minor pentatonic scale. It's a sound that you hear all over tracks like Blackmagic Woman. And once you learn what it is, you're going to start noticing it everywhere in his playing. So, let me show you what it is and how you can use it in your own minor blues solos. To start, let's take a listen to a lick played over the solo section to Blackmagic Woman.

[00:00:50]This lick is mostly built around position one of the D minor pentatonic, but there are two notes in there that sit outside of that box. This note at fret 12 on the high E string and this note at fret nine on the G string.

[00:01:11]They're actually the same note. They're both an E. And this is Santana's, we'll call it magic note. It's called a ninth or natural second. Now, before we get into any theory, I want you to hear what this one note actually does. So, check this out. I'm going to AB two solos over the same solo section to Blackmagic Wu.

[00:01:32]In the first solo, I'm only using the notes of the D minor pentatonic scale.

[00:01:37]So, just the five notes that belong to that scale. In the second solo, I'm gonna use all those notes, but I'm gonna add in the ninth.

[00:02:30]Heat. Heat.

[00:02:40]hear how the second solo suddenly sounds more melodic. Well, that extra emotion is coming from, you guessed it, the ninth. And by the way, stick around to the end because I've got a free Santana lick pack for you that expands on this idea with four more ninthbased phrases.

[00:02:58]So Carlos Santana, he's not switching scales when he plays licks like that.

[00:03:03]The minor pentatonic is his soloing framework and he just drops in that ninth as an additional color note. So where does that note come from? Well, here's the cool part. Santana isn't leaving the minor pentatonic behind when he adds this note in. What he's doing is he is borrowing a note from the full scale that the minor pentatonic is actually built from. So D minor pentatonic is like a five note skeleton of a seven note scale called D Aolon.

[00:03:33]And so Aolon contains two additional notes that the minor pentatonic leaves out. One is called the ninth and the other is called a flat 6th.

[00:03:44]Today we're only focusing on the ninth because that is one of Santana's favorite notes for making his pentatonic lines sing over tracks like Black Magic Women. And it's very easy to find on the fretboard. Just take any root note in any minor pentatonic box, go up a whole step, and you will find the ninth. Uh, another way to see it is it sits one fret below the flat third. So, if you look at box one on the low and high E strings, we've got these two notes, the root note and the flat third. Okay? So, the ninth sits in between the two. So two frets above the root or one fret below the flat third.

[00:04:25]So if we look at box one with the ninth added in in all places, it's going to look like this.

[00:04:40]And you can hear instantly there's so much more melodic color available to you when you add in that ninth.

[00:04:52]Now, here's where Santana really milks the sound of this additional note. He often leans on the ninth right as the progression moves from D minor 7 to A minor 7. That is the first chord change in Blackmagic Woman. So, listen to this lick again and notice how the phrase ends on the ninth when the A minor 7 chord appears in the progression.

[00:05:24]So in that line, I'm starting out over the D minor 7 chord with this basic minor pentatonic phrase.

[00:05:35]And then I bring in the ninth on the high E string, still over the D minor 7 chord when I start this descending run.

[00:05:47]And that right there was the end of the run. And the note that I finish on is E.

[00:05:52]It's the ninth. Okay? And I finish on that note right as the A minor 7 chord arrives.

[00:06:04]Now, it's important to point out that the ninth can work really well over all the chords in this progression, but it sounds particularly nice and santana-esque when you play it over that A minor 7 chord. And the reason it works so well over that chord is it's actually one of the notes found naturally in an A minor 7 chord. So the fifth in an A minor 7 chord is the note E which is the same note as the ninth in D A. So now that you understand what Santana is doing with this note, the next step is learning how to phrase with it. And to help you do that, I've put together a free bonus lesson that is linked in the description box beneath this video. and it's got four extra santana style licks that all use the ninth inside the familiar minor pentatonic boxes. This free bonus lesson is designed to give you some instant vocabulary that you can start stealing for your own solos right away. So, just click the link in the description box beneath this video and I'll send the lesson straight to your email inbox.

[00:07:09]Hope you enjoy it and I will see you guys in the next one.