B Major Pentatonic — Sitar

B Major Pentatonic is 5 notes to the octave (pentatonic family), drawn here across the Sitar's CGCGC strings with every B marked, so home stays visible from anywhere in the pattern.

Open, sunny, and hard to play wrong — with no half steps there is nothing to clash, so every note sits comfortably over a major chord. Warm, folksy, and singable.

Heard in: Country, bluegrass, folk, gospel, Southern rock, and countless pop hooks — from "Amazing Grace" to "My Girl".

Five strings tuned CGCGC put a 12-TET scale map in an honest place: it names every fret and marks every root, but it cannot draw meend, the pitch a sitarist bends into rather than frets outright. Read this as a Western scale laid over the strings, and the thaats engine as the raga-native classification sitting beside it.

A sitarist does not run this scale as a ladder — a raga moves through its own ascent and descent, skips notes deliberately, and lingers on the swaras it favors. Treat this map as a place to find pitches, not a phrase to play.