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In playing guitar, it's necessary to practice skills to develop speed, accuracy, and knowledge of the fingerboard. Scales are made up of notes, and the distance between those notes are referred to as "intervals." For this scale, our intervals will be expressed in whole steps and half steps. Simply put, a half step is a distance of 1 fret, while a whole step is a distance of 2 frets. That's simple enough, isn't it?

With any scale, you can arbitrarily decide where you want the first note to be. (called the 'root' note)

The major scale works at these intervals (R = root, W = whole step, H = half step)

R, W, W, H, W, W, W, H

On a guitar, this would look like this on any given string (We use the low E for this example) :

E-0-2-4-5-7-9-11-12

Go ahead, give it a try. Sound very familiar to you? That's right, it's Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do! This is the major scale, and it goes across 1 entire octave. The first note and the last note are both the same exact note, just a different octave, so in this case, they're both the note E. Try playing the low E and the high E strings at the same time, and then try playing the high E with another string that's not the low E. You'll see how notes of the same octave seem to harmonize a lot better and you'll understand how they're the same note, just different pitch.

As in most most scales, there's many ways to play this particular scale across several strings. A method I like to use is as follows:

D-2-3-
A-1-3-5-
E-1-3-5-

Try moving this scale up and down the fretboard to produce the major scale in many different keys. Practice makes perfect. This is a great way to learn the keys of the fretboard and practice speed and accuracy.

Learn more about this author, Josh Bedn.
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