Scales for Guitarists — An Introduction

You’re a guitar-player huh? Pretty cool, but being a musician is way cooler! To be able to call yourself a musician, you really need to understand the building blocks of music — otherwise, you’re just somebody putting their fingers where they are told to without understand why! So let’s take a look at the first fundamental of music — scales.

Scales are the arrangement of notes in a pattern of intervals from one octave to the next. Scales are used for building melody lines in Lead Guitar, as well as well as being the notes we play in chords — they are essential to all musicians!

The Major Scale

There are many different types of scale, but the most common in western music is the major scale. You may not know you know it, but you do! All those nursery rhymes as a child — the major scale. Every happy pop-song you ever heard — the major scale. The theme tune of 90%+ of all TV shows — the major scale. The sound of music…. wait… what? Yep… The Sound of Music:

do re mi fa so la ti do

You guessed it — that’ll be a major scale. TAB and notation below:

Or to arrange it in the box shape we guitarists are more used to:

The purple notes are the root notes, and the numbers are the fingers I suggest you use — 1=Index, 2=Middle, 3=Ring & 4=Pinky. Recognise it now?

You can read the rest of this article here.

You can find more articles on scales and guitar technique to help you develop as a player here, as well as the guitar grades here. If you’ve got any questions please get in touch on Facebook or Twitter, or leave a comment below.And yeah, I know the theory stuff can seem a bit dull but trust me… it really helps you develop as a player. When everything starts falling it to place it’ll take you to heights you never thought possible!