Learning Guitar Scales

Advertisements

In the previous lesson we've talked about "Guitar Chord Construction (major chords)", and we've learned the formula of constructing or building major chords from the major scale, in this lesson we will discover the 3 easy steps to build any major chord in any given note.

The 2 things used in all music are chords and scales, that what music is: playing chords or sometimes their arpeggios, and soloing using scales as well as arpeggios. Some people think that scales and chords are 2 different things, well i will give you this simple definition "chords are only some notes of scales", the only difference is when we play chords we play all the notes in the same time and we play specific notes according to the chord we want to play.

Let's have a look at the 3 easy steps to build any major chord:

1- In you want to play, let's say the A major chord, you have to play first the A major scale which have these notes (A - B - C# - D - E - F# - G#), on the fretboard it looks like this:

E------------------------------------------------------------
B------------------------------------------------------------
G------------------------------------------------------------
D-------------------------------4---6---7------------------
A-----------------4---5---7--------------------------------
E--------5---7----------------------------------------------

2- You have to give each note of this scale it's number and take only the 1st(root), the 3rd and the 5th notes of that scale:

A - B - C# - D - E - F# - G#
1 -  2 -  3  - 4  - 5 -  6  -  7
A        C#        E

3- Take these notes and play them on a bar chord (easier then the open chord) so every note on the chord will be an A, C# or E.

E-------5(A)---------------------------------------------------
B-------5(E)---------------------------------------------------
G-------6(C#)--------------------------------------------------
D-------7(A)--------------------------------------------------
A-------7(E)--------------------------------------------------
E-------5(A)--------------------------------------------------

How easy is that!, with these easy 3 steps you can play any major chord. Make sure to apply this formula of building major chords after learning guitar scales to have a better and clearer picture.