What are guitar scales? A Quick Tutorial

What are Guitar Scales?

The word scale comes from the Italian word scala, which means ladder. A scale is

simply a collection of pitches that have been arranged into a specific ascending and

descending order.

The melody that a vocalist sings comes from one or more scales. The notes that

are played in guitar solos and riffs come from scales. The chords that are used in

songs come from scales.

There are many different types of scales and many fingerings for them. A basic

knowledge of scales will make it much easier to understand and perform music. In

essence, scales are to music what addition is to mathematics-a foundation upon

which more advanced principles can be developed.

The major scale is by far the most common scale. Since the guitar is an extremely

visual instrument, it makes sense to be able to “see” scale fingerings on the neck.

Below you will find a fingering for the major scale. All of the scale forms that we will

examine are moveable.

In other words, you can play these scales on any fret of the guitar. This will

come in handy when you learn guitar solos and start to improvise your own.

The black notes represent the root notes of each scale. The root note is the

note that indicates the letter-name of a scale or chord. So, if you play the above

scale form so that the root notes are on C’s, you would have a C major scale. If

the same scale form is played with the root notes on A’s, you would have an A

major scale.

Here is the fingering:

Below you will see the same scale fingering shown in tab.

Practice the C major scale forwards and backwards.

The above lesson has been excerpted from The EDGE: CORE Beginner Guitar Lessons Volume 1.

To your guitar success,

Don J. MacLean

Don J. MacLean is one of the world's leading authorities on accelerated learning systems for guitar-with students using his methods in

more than 50 countries worldwide. Don is the author of over 60 books including The Ultimate Guitar EDGE; The World of Scales; the