Did you see that new word in the title? That's right, we've graduated from Guitar 101 and it's time to move into the next level. Excited? I hope so. I know I am. It's time to get into the meat of music and really figure out what's going on. This will separate you from the average person who knows how to strum a few tunes to where you will really understand -why- things work, not just how. Today we will be focusing on the Major Scale. So are you readyyyyyuuuugghghhhh? (Sorry, the Scott Stapp in me came out...) Let's get to it.
Let's first start off with a quick review from a few lessons ago. To effectively understand, well, anything in music...we have got to know the note names front and back so let's take another look at them:
A - A#/Bb - B - C - C#/D - D - D#/Eb - E - F - F#/Gb - G - G#/Ab - A
Familiar? Now, the distance between each note (which is equal) is described as a half-step.
Note: When moving a half-step up, the way you would "count" it is like so; B to C is a half-step, C# to D is a half-step, Bb to B is a half-step, etc.
So if we wanted to move up 2 half-steps, we would say we are moving up a whole step. As my physics teacher used to say "It isn't rocket science, but we're getting there".
Now if we were to sit down and say, "I want to write a song in the key of G major", how would we determine which notes would be harmoncally pleasing to playing along with that G major chord? We would build G major scale and see what notes fit. A major scale (in any key) is built from the following pattern:
2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 1
These numbers indicate the amount of half-steps needed from note to note to build the major scale. Since we are going with the G major scale so we know that G will be our first note, and this note is called the root (also known as the tonic, but we'll just go with root for now). The root note is the 1st note in any scale and determines both the scale notes and the name of the scale.
The distance from G to the second note in the G major scale is 2 half-steps, right? So jump back up to our note chart and start on the G and then move up 2 half-steps. You should have landed on an A. If so, let's try the next note moving from an A, while following our pattern, up 2 half-steps and you should land on the B. We would go on there so on and so forth to the point where you would end up back at G. Try to go through it yourself and see if you end up back at G. If not, look at the following chart and see if it makes more sense (I'm a visual kind-of-guy myself.)
G - A - B - C - D - E - F# - G
2 2 1 2 2 2 1
-OR-
G - G# - A - A# - B - C - C# - D - D# - E - F - F# - G
H H H H H H H H H H H H
2 2 1 2 2 2 1
That looks more like organic chemistry than music if you ask me. Do you think we've got this pattern thing down? Well let's try it on another root note and see what we can come up with for the C major scale.
What did you come up with? It should look like the following:
C - D - E - F - G - A - B - C
I really hate the notion of being like an elemntary school teacher and giving "homework", but it would be highly beneficial to sit down for about an hour and work out the notes for every key following the pattern that we have set up. You don't have to memorize it all before you can move on to the next lesson or anything like that, but just work out building your major scales from each root. Every note on the chromatic scale can be a root, not just a G, C, or any other common notes you hear about.
Hopefully this lesson will give you some more time to get the chords we looked at in a working manner while still feeding the appetite of getting a new, fresh lesson to look at.
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