F# Minor Pentatonic — Sitar

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

Gritty, bluesy, and direct — five notes with no half steps, so each one lands with attitude over a minor or dominant chord. The sound of rock and blues lead playing.

Heard in: Blues, rock, hard rock, metal, funk, and soul solos — the first scale most lead players learn and the one they never leave.

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.