Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here): 

THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!

It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.

DON’T BE LIKE THEM! 

Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks. 

Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.

It’s time for some music theory. 

Remember way back when you learned the musical alphabet and what all those frets were for? 

Today we are going to learn what scales are. 

Just like when we learned the musical alphabet (A-B-C-D-E-F-G), we are going to add just one more letter “A” to the end of that alphabet (A-B-C-D-E-F-G-A). Remember the musical alphabet just starts over once you go beyond G. 

A musical scale goes from one note to the next of the same name (A to A). One note has to be higher than the other. It’s never the exact same note. It’s just the same note name normally an octave away. 

Octave means 8 notes apart, so let’s count the notes: 

The numbering here is static (meaning it doesn’t move). What does move are the letters depending on what scale you’re trying to play. 

As an example, it could look like this:

Or this: 

Or this:

Now most of the time, we are confined to two types of scales: Major and Minor. 

The initial scale we used (A to A) is actually the normal A minor scale. We determine a minor scale using things called half and whole steps. A half step (H) is one fret away while a whole step (W) is two frets away. Here’s how things shape out between the notes in a minor scale:

For a major scale the step-relationships between the notes are different. For our example, we’re going to go from C-C. Exact same notes as before, just a different start and end place. Let’s take a look: 

For both minor and major scales, these note relationships will remain the same. It only depends on what the starting note is. 

Here’s the E minor scale:

Here’s the E major scale:

Here’s the D minor scale: 

Here’s the D major scale:

You’re probably still wondering how the note names are decided. Like in D minor, why is it Bb and not A#? Because we already have A. In a major/minor scale, we need every note of the musical alphabet involved. In this example, if we didn’t have Bb then we could just skip B entirely. NO GOOD! In these types of scales, we need everything. 

To transfer this knowledge to the guitar, take a look at the half and whole step relationships in both scale types again. Start on each string and play both the minor and major versions of each of the scales using only a single string. You should be able to go from the open string to the 12th fret on every string. 

If you can play both the minor and major versions of each scale on a single string, try starting from a single note on one string in the first position (the first frets of the guitar) and play only in the first position for the whole scale. You will need to use more than one string to do this. It will be useful and fun. Try it out on every scale you want.