Building Scale Degrees on Guitars

Video Transcript

MICHAEL PLUNKETT: Hi. This is Michael Plunkett on behalf of Expert Village. Now that we've taken a look at how to build both major and minor scales, we're going to take a look at what we call "scale degrees." It's a way of assigning numbers to the notes on those scales. For the rest of the series, we're going to base what we're learning off of the C major scale. As I explained earlier, it's one of the easiest scales to use because there aren't any accidental notes, it's all natural notes. We don't have any sharps or flats in here. So, it's pretty simple. We've got our seven different notes, eight at the end there. All assigning a scale degree to these notes means is that we--instead of just referring to them as the note names themselves, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, we give them numbers, and we just do it in a consecutive order, so we call them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 and then you can either call this one 8 or you can just call it 1 again too, that's all right. Now, this works with any scale. Here when, of course, the C major scale but I can use this number system when referring to any scale. So, if I wanted to talk about the 7th scale degree, it doesn't matter what scale we're in, I can say we're talking about scale degree 7 and everyone knows what that means. And you'll hear that among musicians when talking about specific notes in the scale and also talking about chords. We'll also see how we build chords out of each one of these scale degrees. It's convenient also when we're playing guitar. A lot of the times when we're playing a scale or when we're playing in a key on guitar, it's more convenient to think about patterns of numbers that we can move around, shift around on guitar than just the notes themselves and we'll see that in a little bit, too. So, these are scale degrees.

Watch these related videos

• 
  Building Scale Degrees on Guitars

  playlist Views: 693

• 
  Building Scales on Guitars with a Chromatic Scale

  playlist Views: 1,293

• 
  Building Scales on Guitars

  playlist Views: 1,650

• 
  Building Scales on Guitars with Half & Whole Steps

  playlist Views: 941

• 
  Building Scales on Guitars with Accidentals

  playlist Views: 1,031

• 
  What Is the Formula for a Minor Scale?

  playlist Views: 807

Community Members who...

• Favorited this Video
• Rated This Video

Thumbs up or Thumbs down? Be the first to rate this video!

Top Tags