Try this major scale form with the one note played with your second finger. That means whatever note that is, the position you play in will be the number of the fret before the one note. For instance, if you want to play an A major scale on two octaves, put your second  finger on the A ( fifth fret of the 6 string) and start from there. You’ll notice that you can use your first finger to play the 7th too!

Practice this scale form up and down the neck, making sure you say the name of the scale, the intervals (half-step or whole step) between the notes or the degrees of the notes ( 1,2 3, etc.) Also look at the shape! It’s pretty distinctive.

Here’s a visual pattern, representing finger positions for a four-fret, two octave major scale on the guitar neck. The 1 string across the top, the 6 string across the bottom. 

It’s just dots in a pattern, right? But mentally drawing a couple horizontal lines across it, one under the top two strings and one over the bottom two strings  shows essentially the same shape on the bottom two strings as on the middle two  strings, but reversed. The 2nd string from the top is different though but it has […]

Thinking about notes as “syllables” and nonsense song lyrics as a way to tell a musical story might be an interesting approach for you if your goal is to write your own music. What did you have for breakfast?

Interested to see if we’re a good fit? Your first face-to-face online lesson is free! Click here to reserve your session!

more free content, song playing instruction at https://patreon.com/guitarcat

Guitar lesson G major scale.  The word “Position” simply tells us what fret our first finger is going to be on, so in second position, 1st finger is on the 2nd fret. In 3rd position, 1st finger is on the 3rd fret.

But there we have 5 frets and only four fingers! Pinkie finger has to do some extra work here, so he can cover the 6th and 7th fret. A 5 fret stretch scale is an excellent exercise to help us teach all our fingers to move accurately and independently.

Also, both the 2nd and 3rd position G Maj. scales are “portable”, meaning that they don’t need an open string. Essentially, if we learn these Major scale patterns in one position we will have them in all 12 keys. Pretty cool, right? Practice these patterns starting at the root, moving to the octave, ascending and descending

G scale is spelled “G,A, B, C, D, E, F# and G. G Major has one sharp which is the 7th (F#), establishing the pattern for adding sharps for the rest of the sharp keys. All the other notes in G are the same notes as in the C major scale, and this makes sense because G and C are very closely […]