The Major scale: for beginners

Hello again,

As some people ask me online about scale, so today I want to explain about it.

We've looked at a few basics around the guitar, and discussed what notes are, the very foundation of music. The next step is to start understanding scales. The problem is that when some people are presented with scales for the first time, and realize that they are being asked to play endless variations of these scales for the foreseeable future, it can become a daunting task. In this introductory lesson we are going to explore some of the reasons that scales exist, and why we make such a big deal about them.

What are scales? A Technical View

There are 12 possible notes(E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, C, C#, D and D#) available for constructing music out of. Western music has evolved such that rules have emerged over how and when you use these notes together. Although this is merely convention, you will be so used to hearing the various common scales that when those rules are not applied, or are applied differently you will immediately notice that something is wrong or different. There is nothing written in stone about the way these things are organised, but we are all so used to hearing music from an early age that incorporates these rules that we don't even think about the alternatives until we start to study musical theory in depth.

As a guitar player, you need to understand these rules if you want to play western style music at all. A fundamental part of these rules and conventions are the musical scales we use.

What is a scale? It is a restricted sequence of notes, chosen from the 12 available, that work together to give a certain desired mood or effect to the music. The best way to describe individual scales is as a list of gaps between the notes, we use the term Tone or Semitone to denote our Half notes or Whole notes, and give the formula using their initial letters, T and S.

Some people use Half and Whole (W,H) to denote the gaps, and another way is to list the number of semitones (1 or 2). Either way, these three are identical and all give the gaps for the major scale:

1. T T S T T T S
2. W W H W W W H
3. 2 2 1 2 2 2 1

Lets see how this works. Picking a scale at random - G# major. This initially tells us two things. First, our root note (or first note in the scale) is G#. Secondly, we will be using the Major scale formula to work out the notes.

So, we start with our G# note, and add the first step of the formula which is a T, meaning a Tone. So starting with a G# and moving up a tone or two half notes puts us onto A#:

G# + T = A#

Next, we start with A#, and look at the next letter in the formula - its a Tone again, so we add 2 half notes to A#, to give us a C:

A# + T = C

Next, we start with a C and check the formula - this time it is a semitone, which takes us to C#:

C + S = C#

If we carry on with this we get the following:

C# + T = D#

D# + T = F (remember there is no such thing as an E#)

F + T = G

G + S = G#

So, we have built our scale of G# major according to our major scale formula to get the notes:

G# A# C C# D# F G

The majority of scales we use have 7 notes in them but that is not a hard and fast rule. For instance, the minor pentatonic scale only has 5 notes in it (its formula is 3 2 2 3 2 - I used numbers here instead of T and S because it has a couple of Tone and a half leaps, which is 3 half notes, and that is more easily written down as a 3 instead of something like "T + 1/2", but it all means the same thing). Some scales have more, for instance the chromatic scale has all 12 notes in it.

So that's how scales work! The formula describes them and we pick whichever root note we want to construct them around. The next step is to convert these notes into a pattern so that we can play it.

Have a nice day.