Good day fellow students of the guitar, it’s Darrin Goodman again with yet another little lesson for you on how to learn guitar scales.
A guitar scale or musical scale is simply the notes that are in a given key. Here in the western part of the world we use seven tone scales, meaning that there are seven notes in the scale. These are divided up into seven scales known as the Seven Major Modes; Ionian (aka Major), Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian (aka Natural Minor), and Locrian.
There are many other scales besides the seven tone scales such as the pentatonic scale, harmonic minor scale and whole tone scale. I would need to write a whole book to cover all of them, so for this article I am going to cover two really easy and common ones that you can use right away with just about any style of music.
The Major Scale: The Major Scale consists of the seven notes found in what ever key you happen to be playing in. Today lets look at the key of G Major, which has the seven notes; G, A, B, C, D, E, F# and then just starts over. Although there are only seven actual notes, the example below illustrates 18 played notes, they simple just keep repeating to cover all six strings.
The Minor Pentatonic Scale: The minor pentatonic scale consists of five. If you take the major scale and omit the second and sixth notes and lower the third and seventh notes by one half step you get the pentatonic scale. Let’s look at it in the key of E minor, which is the relative minor of G major, this way you can use both of these scale patterns together. The notes in the E minor pentatonic scale are; E, G, A, B and D. The example below shows 12 notes, but again that is because we are just repeating the same notes over again.
Be sure to practice both of these in different keys and positions on the Fretboard so that you can get the most use from them. If you really want to become a scale master you should check out the course “Fretboard Domination”. Here is the link.
https://guitarcontrol.net/gc-preview/gcblog4/fretboard-domination/dvds.php
I hope this helps you on your guitar journey.
Peace,
Darrin
