Major Scale for Beginning Guitar

Video Transcript

BRYAN BILLHIMER: Hi. I'm Bryan Billhimer and on behalf of Expert Village, welcome to guitar playing 101, the basics. Okay. So, now we're going to talk about the major scale. The major scale is kinda like the building blocks of music. Everything in music is based off of this scale. You'll see it come up time and time again as you advance further in your guitar playing. And it's basically a seven-note scale based on whole steps and half steps. Now, a whole step on guitar is basically playing one fret and a whole step would be skipping a fret and playing the next one, so that's a whole step. We went from G to A. So, anytime you skip a fret on a guitar, that's a whole step. A half step is half that. It's playing the next fret up. That's a half step. We went from G to G sharp. So the step pattern from a major scale if you look on this piece of paper is whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. That's our step pattern. Now, I'll show you how that goes on a guitar if you--if you play it on one string and we play the G major scale, which is a G major scale because we started on G, so whatever note you start on is the name of that scale. So G we do whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step. So, you can start that anywhere; as long as you follow that step pattern, you'll be playing a major scale. Let's try another one. We'll start on C, this time on the A string; the same thing. Whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. The next thing I'm going to do is show you how to play a major scale a different way.

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