How to Play the Major Scale in Jazz Guitar

Video Transcript

Hi! My name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com. I am a professional guitar instructor and today we are going to be studying beginning jazz guitar. Okay to start off with today in our beginning jazz guitar lesson, we are going to start off discussing the major scale. Remember that in jazz guitar that a big part of your job is playing chords. Chords are all based from the major scale. We create chords by combining and altering notes from a major scale and put chords together in chord progressions often according to a major scale. So the first steps towards understanding the major scale is to be able to play them. The step pattern for a major scale is whole step, which is 2 frets on a guitar followed by another whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half so whole whole half, whole whole whole half. I'm going to play that across the neck of the guitar. I am going to be using a G major scale for example but this would be a movable major scale pattern. Here it is a G starting here to the third low e-string. That was ascending, now descending. I could play that same scale pattern here an A note and I would have an A major scale. Okay. That's a one octave major scale taking that same pattern and moving it over here to the 5th string creates another major scale pattern. Here for example would be a C major scale. A D major scale and so on and so on.

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