Learning guitar scales goes hand in hand with learning the guitar itself.This page is dedicated to everything related to scales – how to play them, how to use them – as well as a growing library of different scales in different keys and positions.
If you are already somewhat experienced with scales, use the links below to jump straight to a specific lesson. If you’re looking for a specific scale, click on the following link to scroll straight to the Scales Library section.
If you’re a beginner, this page has been designed to take you from knowing absolutely nothing to understanding what they are, how they’re constructed and how they’re used to create music.
How To Learn Scales On Guitar
An interval is simply a measurement of the distance between two notes. There are certain names given to different intervals. The main ones we are concerned with for learning scales are semitones and tones:
Tones and semitones. One fret and two frets. It’s as simple as that. There are actually larger intervals (e.g. three frets), but for now, just try to remember tones and semitones.
As mentioned before, scales are simply a sequence of notes, separated by intervals. The easiest way tovisualiseintervals is to restrict yourself to one string only. Therefore, the easiest way to understand scales is to learn them initially on one string, even though this is rarely how they are played when we’re actuallypractisingand using scales.
Pentatonic Major Scale Guitar Fretboard Patterns Chart, Key Of C By Jay Skyler
The Major scale is a super important scale (more on that later). It is essentially the Godfather scale, that is used as a reference point for all other scales. But let’s not worry about that now.
You can think of the root note as the ‘home’ note, or starting point for any given scale. For example, the root note of the A Major scale is ‘A’. The root note of the D minor scale is ‘D’. The root note of the Eb (“E Flat”) Major scale is ‘Eb’.
With this information, you should be able to try out the Major scale yourself, by playing the above interval sequence on one string. Simply pick any note on any string, and then move up the fretboard on the same string, using the intervals displayed above.
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I have deliberately only included tabs, and not notes, because I want you to get a feel for experiencing scales from the visual perspective of intervals.
But remember, we can (and should) do this same exercise from any starting note (root note). Let’s do another example on the 2
As you can see (and hear), even though we started from a different note, we still played the Major scale, because in both examples, we used the same sequence, or pattern, of intervals.
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Do more examples yourself. Once you start to remember the interval pattern, you should be able to move through scales quite quickly and easily.
You should be able to hear that the natural minor is a different sounding scale, with a different mood, when compared to the Major scale. Again, you should try playing this scale by staying on one string and starting on different notes.
Once you know the interval structure of a given scale, you can very easily play the scale on one string. So far, we’ve looked at two types of scales (Major and natural minor).
Scales Sheet Music For Guitar (solo)
If you want to jump in and play some more scales using the intervals on one string approach, here are some more.
Playing scales on one string is a great way to simplify the often mystifying world of scales. But as you might have guessed, it’s rare that we actually play scales on one string, when using them in actual musical situations (like improvising or writing a song).
Scale diagrams are very similar to chord diagrams. The vertical lines represent strings. Thehorizonatallines represent frets. The circled numbers represent left hand fingers (1
How To Play A Major Scale On Guitar 5 Shapes To Know
Here is a scale diagram for the Major scale, played over one octave. ‘One octave’ simply means that we start the scale from a given note (root note), and then finish when we reach a higher version of that same note.
For each circled number that you see on the scale diagram (starting from the lowest note), you simply ask yourself the following.
To play the scale, you simply start from the lowest note (lowest in terms of pitch) and play through every note until you get to the highest note (pitch).
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If that sounds confusing, here is the scale diagram again, along with tabs. Each red number in the scale diagram corresponds to the red number in the tabs.
One thing to keep in mind with scale diagrams, is that they are usually ‘moveable’. For example, we played the above scale diagram using the first four frets, but actually, we could play it using any four adjacent frets. For example, we could play the scale starting on the 6
Also, try playing the scale ascending (going from lowest note to highest note) and then descending (going from highest note back down to the lowest note). This is very often how scales are played, in their basic form.
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For example, starting on the 6th string and 8th fret (C), would give us the C Major scale. This time, the staff notation is included as well.
We only focused on the scale diagram for the Major scale, but of course, there are many other scales as well. Now that you know how to read scale diagrams, we could simply go through different scales, and look at the appropriate diagrams for each scale.
Learning a scale based on one diagram does not tell the full story. In fact, it doesn’t even tell half the story.
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Let’s say we want to play the G Major scale. Based on the diagram that we looked at before, we could simply start on the 3
This is a perfectly good G Major scale. But what if we want to play the G Major scale higher up the fretboard? Remember, the above version of the G Major scale does not move beyond the 5
Fret. Yet there are more frets out there. Maybe we want to use higher pitched notes. Maybe we’re soloing, and the solo calls for some notes in a higher position.
A Better Way To Learn The Major Pentatonic Scale On Guitar
The point is, if we only learn a scale in on position, we’re depriving ourselves of access tomost of the fretboard. By the way, simply moving higher up the fretboard and using the same ‘shape’ gives us the Major scale in a different key, which is not what we want to do if we’re trying to stay in the one key.
The main thing to observe is that the strings are represented horizontally, and the frets are represented vertically. This is different than the scale diagram format that we have been looking at so far, which has the strings represented vertically and the frets horizontally.
Let’s add the notes of the Major scale based on the shape that we have been looking at so far. Here is the G Major scale.
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As you can see from this entire fretboard diagram, our original Major scale shape only allows us to cover one small area of the fretboard, in any given key.
The solution is to learn each scale in five different positions. By learning the scale in five different positions, we will cover the entire fretboard.
There is an explanation behind what each of the letters mean, and we’ll go through it, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think the explanation is important. If you just remember that the word CAGED means five positions, you’ve basically got what you need.
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If we take away the open notes and arrange these shapes so that they are all in the one key, the shapes get distributed (more or less) evenly across the fretboard. For example, the key of C:
We have put them all in the same key (key of C), so they’re now all technically C chords, but you can still associate the shapes with their original labels (C, A, G, E, D).
So how does this relate to scales? Well, as a general rule, if we learn any scale in five different positions, we will cover the entire fretboard, just like in the chord examples above.
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The above five images are five different ways of playing the same scale (Major scale). This means that if you play each of the above shapes and keep the root note the same (for example, ‘G’), you will cover five different positions of the fretboard.
This is probably easiest to understand visually. Here are the five shapes again, as well as their placement on the fretboard. For this example, we will choose the key of G (all root notes are G):
We could technically go through each of the above five shapes and associate each one with a letter from the word ‘CAGED’, but as I mentioned earlier, that’s not important. The important thing is that you understand the following.
Jazz Guitar Lessons Scales
One thing to keep in mind is that even though each of the shapes uses the same root note as a starting point (in the above example, ‘G’), we are using different G notes across the fretboard. Which brings me to another point.
In a nutshell, playing scales involves learning shapes,
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