Building Scales on Guitars with a Chromatic Scale

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. The first thing that we're going to do to get started is take a look at what we call the chromatic scale. This is a series of 12 notes that all of Western music is based around. Anything you hear from classical to jazz, blues, rock, country, pretty much anything you're going to hear on the radio is based off of these 12 notes. It's easiest to describe when looking at an example of the piano. You can see this is a basic way out of what a piano looks like. We've got 12 different notes. Starting from A, we have these black notes as they're on black keys in the piano. This one they've got two different names; we can call this A sharp or B flat. Basically, it's one note but we can give it two different names. Going from there, we've got B, C, and then we've got C sharp/D flat, D, D sharp and E flat, E, F, F sharp/G flat, that's one note there, G, G sharp or A flat, and A. After 12, there's 12 of them here total, it repeats again. You'll notice that B and C are right next to each other, there's not a B flat or--I'm sorry, B sharp or a C flat and the same goes with E and F. This applies to the guitar and basically the same way, all of these notes are right next to each other on the piano. Well, that works like that on a guitar too. So, we start with one note, in this case, the 5th string is A so I'll use the 5th string, and if I move up to one fret, it's just like moving up to one note on the piano: A, A sharp, E, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp and back to A again at the end, that's where it repeats 12 frets later. I--We go through the full cycle and that's what we call the chromatic scale. It's basically all of the notes that we use in Western music.

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