Four Frets, Two Octaves. Major scale form

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 one note that lines up vertically with notes on the same fret on all the other strings!  And the 1 string pattern is exactly the same as the 6 string. Is this a helpful way of looking at notes on the neck of the guitar? For some people, perhaps. But merely having a cursory understanding of something is not at all the same thing as knowing it… and that’s where the rubber meets the road. Getting these ideas into “muscle memory” is the next stop.

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