Posts tagged: guitar scale theory

May 10, 2011

7 Reasons Why You Should Learn and Master Guitar Scales

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Whether you’re just getting started on guitar or have been playing for years, if you are like most people, your biggest problem on guitar is getting enough time to practice.

With your limited time you want to get as much enjoyment as you can out of your guitar practice sessions.  And of course, you want to improve your guitar playing as quickly as possible.

But let’s face it.  With limited time it’s not so easy.

You’ve heard that you should learn to play guitar scales, but let’s be honest…you would rather play your favourite guitar songs instead of playing boring old guitar scales.

So is it really worth investing some of your limited practice time into learning and mastering guitar scales?

Let me start by asking you this: “Why did you decide to learn to play guitar?”

Now I don’t have to be a mind reader to answer this. Pretty much everyone that decides to learn to play guitar does it because they want to play their favourite songs.  In my 20+ years of teaching I have yet to meet anyone that wanted to learn to play the guitar to only play scales and chords.

So if your main reason for learning to play guitar is to learn songs, then you’ll be interested in anything that makes it easier to learn songs and play them better.  And if you could learn songs faster that would be the icing on the cake.

Now here are 7 compelling reasons why you will probably want to start investing a bit of time into learning and mastering guitar scales…

1. When you play guitar songs, the riffs and licks actually come from scales.

That’s right.

When you play those single note lines in a song they are really just rearranged notes from guitar scales.  So if you already know how to play the scales that are used in the riffs, you will learn those parts of the song much faster.

2. When you know how to play the most common guitar scales, you will learn to play guitar solos faster.

A guitar solo is simply a guitar melody that is created from one or more guitar scales.  If you already know how to play the scales, all you have to do is learn the order that the notes are used.  This makes it much easier to learn guitar solos.  When you know the scales you already know half of the guitar solo!  You just need to learn the order that the notes are used in song.

3. Would you love to be able to pick up the guitar and jam with some friends?

Just imagine being able to create your own guitar solos and make it look easy.

How do you do it?

Guitar solos are built from scales.  If you know your scales and which chords go best with them, you can create cool guitar solos.

4. When you practice guitar scales you will improve your guitar technique.

There are many different ways to practice guitar scales─some more effective than others.  Generally though, the more varied your practice approach to scales, the better your technique will become.  And of course, as your technique improves you will begin to learn guitar songs faster and faster.

5. Learning guitar scales improves your overall understanding of music.

This is a biggie!  The more you learn about music, the faster you will learn new things in music.  So as you learn more about music you will be able to learn songs faster.  Also, as you learn more about music, you’ll have more tools to use for writing your own songs.  So you’ll find writing songs will be easier too.

6. As you learn guitar scales, you will learn arpeggios faster.

When you learn and master guitar scales, you will “see” arpeggio shapes within scale forms.  An arpeggio is simply the notes of a chord played one-by-one.  Often these notes are played in quick succession with sweep picking.  Arpeggios are used in guitar riffs and guitar solos.

7. When you master guitar scales, you will see chord shapes within scale fingerings.

This will make is easier to create guitar solos.  You will be able to see the actual chords that you can use the scale over.  Here is an example:

Below you will see an A minor chord.

Now here is an A minor scale.

Notice how the notes in the A minor chord are found in the A minor scale fingering.  This means you can use the A minor scale to create a guitar solo over top of the A minor chord.

The black notes in the above A minor scale form show the notes in an A minor barre chord.

Now I could go on.  There are actually many more reasons why it’s worth investing some of your practice time into guitar scales, but I won’t get into that here.

Even with these 7 great reasons to learn guitar scales, most guitar players still find learning scales to be about as exciting as watching the grass grow.

The main reason for this is that most guitarists learn scales by rote─they practice scales forwards and backwards over and over and over again.

Learning guitar scales this way is as hard as trying to drain a swimming pool with a soda straw!  You can do it, but who wants to take that long?

There is a better way to learn and master guitar scales.

You’ll learn how to do that in The World of Scales: A Compendium of Scales for the Modern Guitar Player.

In the World of Scales you will discover the most effective ways to quickly learn, master and understand guitar scales.  You’ll also learn some really fun ways to practice and apply guitar scales.   And of course, as you improve your scale mastery, you will learn songs faster and faster.  You can learn more about this proven method here: How to Learn and Master Guitar Scales.

July 9, 2010

Here’s a Quick Way to Understand the Major Scale on Guitar

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A lot of beginning guitar players don’t really know what a major scale is. Today we are going to explain exactly what scales are and what they are really used for.  Then we will look at making sense of guitar scales on the guitar fretboard.

What are Scales?

When you hear a singer sing, the notes that they sing come from a scale.

When you hear a guitar solo, the notes being played come from a scale.

The chords that accompany a singer or guitar solo come from a scale.

Just as a painter will select and mix certain colours to create a specific mood, a musician will pick certain notes or combinations of notes to create the desired affect.

Scales represent the foundation for essentially all music theory. So as you can probably guess, having a good understanding of scales and how to apply them is essential for all guitarists.

The word scale comes from the Italian word “scala”, which means ladder. A scale is simply a collection of pitches that have been arranged into a specific ascending and descending order. Scales are used as a basis for writing songs and also for soloing over chords.

Make sense? Ok, let’s take a look at the major scale…

The Major Scale

The major scale is by far the most common scale used in popular music. In order to have a major scale, there must be a specific arrangement of semitones and whole tones. A semitone is the distance of one fret on the guitar. The whole tone, also known as a tone, is the distance of two frets.

The C major scale consists of the following notes:

C D E F G A B C

Now let’s take a closer look at this scale. Let’s start by playing these notes on the 5th string.

Here is the C major scale played up the fifth string:

C Major Scale up one string

The T represents a tone and the ST represents a semitone.

Now let’s take a closer look at this scale. The distance from C to D is two frets or a tone. So the distance from D to E is a tone. The distance from E to F is a semitone (one fret). The distance from F to G is a tone. The distance from G to A is a tone and the distance from A to B is also a tone. Finally, the distance from B to C is a semitone.

To recap here is what we have:

C -T- D -T- E -ST- F -T- G -T- A -T- B -ST- C

The Major Scale Formula

We now have the formula for building any major scale:

T    T    ST   T   T    T   ST

So now you can build any major scale you want. All you have to do is pick a starting note and then simply plug in the formula.

All right, so let’s put this to use. Let’s say that you want to know the notes in the D major scale.

So you start with the note D and apply the formula. This means you start with D and move up a tone. This takes you to the note E.

D -T- E

Next you need to go up a tone from the note E. Now you should recall that E to F is a semitone apart. To follow the formula you need a tone so that means that you should raise the note F by one fret. This will give you an F#.

D -T- E -T- F#

How do you know whether to call the note F# or Gb? For you to have a major scale all seven notes must be present. In other words, there must be some sort A, B, C, D, E, F, and G in the scale. Also, the notes need to be there in successive order. So you wouldn’t be able to do D E Gb, because the F is missing.

So let’s continue with the formula. So far we have done T T, so now we need our semitone:

D -T- E -T-  F# -ST- G

Next we move up a tone:

D -T- E -T- F# -ST- G -T- A

Now it’s up a tone again:

D -T- E -T- F# -ST- G -T- A -T- B

Next it is up a tone yet again:

D -T- E -T- F# -ST- G -T- A -T- B -T- C#

And finally, we move up one semitone:

D -T- E -T- F# -ST- G -T- A -T- B -T- C# -ST- D

So we now have the notes in a D major scale:

D E F# G A B C#

Let’s take a look at one more example. Let’s say you want to build a major scale off of the note F. If you apply the formula, here is your result:

F -T- G -T- A -ST- Bb -T- C -T- D -T- E -ST- F

F  G  A  Bb  C  D  E  F

As you can see there is one flat in the F major scale. How do we know that it is a Bb instead of an A#? Remember our rule: to have a major scale all seven notes must be present. There can’t be any doubled notes (except the first and last notes in the scale). So you wouldn’t be able to do F G A A#, because there would be two A’s present.

Below you will find a table of all of the major scales.

C major   C D E F G A B C

G major   G A B C D E F# G

D major   D E F# G A B C# D

A major   A B C# D E F# G# A

E major   E F# G# A B C# D# E

B major   B C# D# E F# G# A# B

F# major   F# G# A# B C# D# E# F#

C# major   C# D# E# F# G# A# B# C#

F major   F G A Bb C D E F

Bb major   Bb C D Eb F G A Bb

Eb major   Eb F G Ab Bb C D Eb

Ab major   Ab Bb C Db Eb F G Ab

Db major   Db Eb F Gb Ab Bb C Db

Gb major   Gb Ab Bb Cb Db Eb F Gb

Cb major   Cb Db Eb Fb Gb Ab Bb Cb

So there you have it. You now understand the basics of the major scale. For a quick and easy way to learn, memorize and apply the most common guitar scales, check out Guitar Essentials: Scale Master Expanded Edition.

June 1, 2010

How Can I Make My Own Guitar Scales?

categories Guitar Scales, Play Guitar | comments 0 Comments

This is a great question that I get asked from time to time.  In this post we will look at 6 great ways to create guitar scales.

But before we get into the 6 techniques, we need to cover a bit of background…

Music has been around for a very, very long time.  Ethnomusicologists have found that music was present in even the most primitive tribal cultures. No one so far has been able to determine exactly when music began.

Different cultures use different pitch systems whereby they divide the octave differently than we do in the West.  In Western culture we divide the octave into 12 equal divisions.  This is known as equal temperament.  For comparison, it’s quite common for instruments in India to divide the octave into 22 parts.  The Slendro scale, which is common in Indonesia, divides the octave into 5 parts of which we can only accurately play the first note with our equal tempered tuning.

With the 12 notes we have available to us in the West, there are 479,001,600 possible arrangements!  So yes there are lots of possibilities, however, you will be pretty hard pressed to discover a guitar scale that has never been used or conceived before.

The first thing to understand about guitar scales is that a scale is simply a collection of pitches that have been arranged into a specific ascending and descending order.  Usually, the ascending and descending forms of the scale are the same, but this is not a requirement.  There are some scales where the ascending form is actually different than the descending.

Scales can have as few as 4 notes in them or can have all 12 (this is called the chromatic scale).  Seven note scales (heptatonic scales) are the most common in the West.

Here are 6 ways to create guitar scales.

First check out a good comprehensive guitar scales book such as my book, the World of Scales: A Compendium of Scales for the Modern Guitar Player.  Play through all of the scales and mark off all of the scales you like the sound of.  Once you’ve identified the scales you like, commit them to memory and start to create some melodies, guitar solos and songs.

Second you can work it out manually yourself.  This is a much longer way to go.  All you would do is grab a stack of paper and write out the notes C D E F G A B C. Next, begin to add sharps and then flats and then combinations of the two.  This method becomes more of a mathematical exercise than a musical one.  Once you’re finished, play through your results.

Another way of doing this is to just use numbers.  So you would take the scale degrees that you want, for example 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 and then you would start to add sharps and or flats.  So you could start with 1 b2 3 4 5 6 7; 1 b2 b3 4 5 6 7; etc.

Third, you can start with a chord you want to play a melody over.  You take the chord tones and write them down.  Next you experiment with the notes that are not part of the chord.  Write down the ones that you like and presto—you’ve got a scale.  Again, chances are pretty good that the scale you come up with will already have a name.

Fourth, drop out notes from an existing scale you know.  Let’s say you take a C minor scale and drop out the 4th and the 7th notes.  The result would be C D Eb G Ab C.  This creates a very cool sounding scale.  It’s a Japanese pentatonic (5 note) scale called the Hirajoshi scale.

Fifth, add in notes to an existing scale you know.  Let’s say you start with an A minor pentatonic scale: A C D E G A.  Add a B to this and you get the following 6 note (hexatonic) scale: A B C D E G A.

Finally, let’s say you are looking for a dark sounding scale.  Here’s what you do.  Start with a C major scale.  The notes in a C major scale are C D E F G A B C.

Now here’s the thing to keep in mind—as you add flats to the notes, the scale will sound darker.  As you add sharps, the scale will sound brighter.  Two scales that have a dark sound are C Db Eb F G Ab Bb C  (this is called C Phrygian) and C Db Eb F Gb Ab Bb C (this is C Locrian).

To go the opposite way to create a bright sound you take the C major scale and raise the 4th degree.  Your result is a bright sounding C Lydian :  C D E F# G A B C.

Believe it or not, this just scratches the surface of scale creation.

So you can do it on your own with 100% pure experimentation. Or, you can learn some guitar scale theory to save yourself some time and then add in some experimentation. This will give you hundreds or even thousands of guitar scales at your disposal.

Have fun!

Don J MacLean

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