You know the minor pentatonic box. You have lived in it. You have paid rent in it. And somewhere around the ten-thousandth run up and down those five notes, you started to sound suspiciously like every other guitarist who also never left the building. Good news: the exit door was inside the box the whole time, and it is labelled "skip a string."
This tiny clip is Lick #55, a string skipping pentatonic lick — same familiar notes, except I jump clean over the middle string so the phrase leaps in sixths instead of shuffling along in tidy little steps. It sounds bigger, more angular, a bit more expensive than it actually is. Tabs and a Guitar Pro file are waiting for you below.
How this string skipping pentatonic lick works
In a normal pentatonic box, neighbouring strings sit a fourth or a minor third apart, so moving between them gives you those cosy, close intervals everyone recognises. The trick here is to refuse the string next door: play a note, then skip over the middle string entirely and land two strings away. That single leap widens the interval into a sixth, and suddenly the same five notes sound open, vocal and modern instead of boxy. Wide-interval melodies simply don't fit under the fingers the lazy way, which is exactly why they cut through.
The concrete takeaway: the hard part isn't your fretting hand, it's the picking hand clearing that skipped string cleanly. Mute it — rest a fretting finger lightly across it, or let your palm cover it — so it stays silent while you hop over, and start painfully slow before you add speed. If you want the underlying mechanic on its own, my String Skipping Technique lesson breaks the jump down in detail.
Learn it, and you get to keep playing the exact scale you already know while everyone assumes you finally practised something new. If you want the Guitar Pro file and the original videos, they live on my Patreon.