Starting theory - some Q's on Scales

Kultschar

A bit embarrassing but sounds like many of us in the same boat.

Played with guitars for well over 15 years - my gear FAR exceeds my capabilities etc.  In a nutshell I have just learnt songs, snippets of songs etc over the years and skipped the "boring" theory stuff despite buying books etc.

Anyhow - now older, wiser etc and YouTube / Online videos are a revelation compared to back in the day etc so this week I decided to get properly stuck in and actually enjoying it so far.   I did trawl YouTube for tutorials but got sick of the vast selection and lack of structure so signed up to TrueFire and downloaded 3 or 4 of the top rated courses with a nice 40% discount code I found online  (40WATT if any use to people).

A lot of courses seem to start with basic chords, barre chords etc so I have jumped to into what I feel I really need to do -  learning the Fretboard and Scales as I am poor at improvising and solos.

A few things I have wondered about and there seems to be some conflicting info so would appreciate any views:

1) Which Scale to start on?   I see some start on Major Scale, some recommend Minor Pentatonic.   I am mainly a rock / metal fan / player etc and they seem to nudge towards the Minor Pentatonic

2) Out of interest one tutor mentions a lot of people only bother to learn a few postions in each scale - is this generally the case?  I guess some people are missing out the sharps and flats etc

3) Would it be the case that the average seasoned player focuses on one or two scales only and do not learn the rest?  I guess it takes a fair bit of time and memory to master one scale in all positions.

4) I was just getting into the swing of Minor Pentatonic with a nice printout of the 5 patterns to work with in front of the TV at night but then I watched a YouTube video showing the E Minor Pentatonic played with lots of open notes - is this an alternative method?   Confused here with this unless getting things mixed up!!

5) CAGE - appear to be tagged on the end of a fair few courses so I guess best to leave this until mastered some scales?


Cheers!!

sev112

If you’ve learned the Minor Pentatonic in 5 patterns/positions, then you’ve already learned CAGED

Kultschar

sev112 said:

If you’ve learned the Minor Pentatonic in 5 patterns/positions, then you’ve already learned CAGED

Ah ok thats good to know - ive learnt 3 positions out of the five so far.  Will do some more research on it!

joeW

Minor pentatonic sits nicely for guitars and fits over a lot more than you’d think.  That said knowing the major scale is so much more helpful when it comes to mapping out chords and understanding the harmony of songs better.  It’s the essential scale for western harmony 

hollywoodrox

The minor pentatonic is great to get started with as it is so popular in most Genres especially rock blues & pop.  

The Major scale is to me  the key to the whole of music ,  those  8 notes in an octave 
  Can be used to build all the chords  explain intervals , write melodies  , build different flavours of scales (modes) it’s amazing & not as daunting as it sounds with the amount of media available today .

Cranky

If you really want to learn music/fretboard theory, learn the major scales.  Everything is derivative of, relative to, the major.

If you know minor pentatonic, then you are two notes away from knowing that entire minor scale.  And if you know that minor scale, you also know it’s relative major scale.  And if you don’t know what a relative major/minor is, then that’s a great place to start.

Someone above mentioned CAGED.  I personally love CAGED and got a great deal out of it.  On that note, I would say that, part and parcel of learning the major scales is learning all of the chords of the scale and how those chords are constructed in different parts of the fretboard.  You will see how each chord shape (the C shape, A shape, G, E and D) are implied at each of the 5 pentatonic positions.  

Roland

Kultschar said:

… I have jumped to into what I feel I really need to do -  learning the Fretboard and Scales as I am poor at improvising and solos…

Learning the names of the notes on the fretboard is a memory exercise. Learning how to use them effectively takes practice.

There’s a group of players who focus on playing scales and/or arpeggios. They can race up and down the fretboard faster than they can think. They don’t necessarily know the instrument, just patterns of finger movements.

There are players who learn licks. It can sound impressive, as if they know what they’re doing, but it’s still patterns of finger movements. You could call them “people who only bother to learn a few positions in each scale”. I wouldn’t denigrate them because many of us are in this group, and many have made a living this way.

If I was starting again I would:
1. Learn a chord shape at a particular place on the fretboard.
2. Learn the names of the notes in that chord.
3. Work out which of the non-chord notes around it can work with the chord.
4. Find a song which uses that chord, because you need to know how everything works in context.
Rinse and repeat for other chord shapes and positions. 

Once you get past a simple level of playing scales don’t tell you which notes you can play. They are a method of categorising which notes you have played. I sometimes read about “playing outside” or “borrowing notes from the Phrygian scale”. These kind of statements imply that the player is doing something daring requiring great expertise. No. He/she’s just playing notes which don’t fit into the way the listener has chosen to categorise them.

Despite what I’ve said above you will inevitably want to learn some scales. Start with the minor pentatonic. As you branch out from the minor pentatonic you add one or two notes to get the Dorian and Aeolian minor scales. Notice how they are different from each other. Then learn the major scale, and how it overlaps and differs from the minors. Then the Mixolydian, which is major with a flattened 7th note. 

digitalkettle

It's been mentioned above briefly, but I would think of a scale as a sequence of intervals. This might seem like another layer to learn but they're the basic building blocks that generate all scales, chords, and arpeggios...it's all the same stuff!

So your minor pentatonic is built from the intervals: 1 b3 4 5 b7
If you want A minor pentatonic, that's: A C D E G
If you want D minor pentatonic, that's: D F G A C

Similar to chords, you apply the scale with a voicing (or shape) and that's where systems like CAGED might come in...there's no magic there, it's just an approach for using shapes to cover the fretboard in five positions.

The minor pentatonic is a subset of the natural minor: 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7

The natural minor scale is a 'peer' of the natural major scale (1 2 3 4 5 6 7), i.e. if you start from the major scale's sixth degree, you get the natural minor scale: C major = C D E F G A B / A minor = A B C D E F G
In fact, the modes mentioned above are all derived by starting from different degrees of the major scale.
But not everyone gets into that explicitly and none of it means very much without context...a tonal centre.

^ I hope that doesn't seem too complicated...it's kind of mathematical but I think it shows that there's not much to remember really. Burn your chord and scale dictionaries

To echo some of the previous sentiment, if I were starting again, I'd remind myself to never forget about what chords I'm playing over.

viz

Just approaching it from entirely the other end, rather starting with vocabulary and grammar, you could start with tunes that your heart wants to sing, and try and play them. Then you can apply theory rules to them, if you wish. 

Because starting with scales, though probably comfortable to your hands, is potentially going to make you play like every other guitarist playing in the blues box. I mean, we've all done it, but if you can ALSO think "I want to play what I just whistled while that song was playing", then you'll be approaching things from a musical perspective. 

Roland

This is a useful video. Guthrie Trapp takes the Am pentatonic, and show what you can do by adding one note, B, which is the second note of most minor scales. It shows how much mileage you can get from just one note. Towards the end he adds another note, F#.

https://youtu.be/Foxeem8pSpo

As @viz says, it helps to hear each of these additional notes in the context of a song.

Stratavarious

Major and minor pentatonics are certainly a shortcut approach to soloing.  You can get yourself out of a lot of holes in an improvisation knowing how to use them. Add blue notes and a lot opens up.

plenty of guitarists do fine just with that. 

But for me,,, the big step and early revelation was modes and the relationship to chords.   So understand the major scale as a series of intervals, understand the scales and arpeggios that exist if you keep the interval pattern but start at each note of the original major scale.

So just for the C major pattern you also have a scale that works for Dm, Em, F, G, Am and Bdim.

This explains it well..
https://www.guitarlessonworld.com/lessons/modes/

But I’d have the major scale in your fingers before tackling modes. If you start the same pattern down a tone and half (a minor third) you have a scale for minor chords..   C Major = Am

Once you know the scale chords, you then know loads of chords that work together for composing,

You will also find you can pick out any tune you can sing or whistle once you have major and minor scales embedded..  the post above about that is possibly the best you advice will get.  

Find and play little tunes not patterns.   Makes solos their own little melodies rather than a sequence of riffs that fit,

sev112

Here’s something that after years of playing music, learning about music and theory (including scales and modes etc) which made everything so much easier for me 

I realised that the difference between a major chord (1 3 5)  and a minor chord (1 b3 5) was that 
- Major : Root +4semitones/frets +3semitones/frets
- Minor : Root +3  +4
(Which means the 5th note is the same for both,  always 7 semitones/frets above the Root)

Now 3 frets is a Minor 3rd interval, and 4 frets is a Major 3rd interval

So that Major Chord (E.g. C E G for C major) is made up of a Root, a Major 3rd and a Minor 3rd above that
and the Minor chord (E.g. C Eb G for C minor) is a Root, a minor 3rd and a Major 3rd above that

So if FOR ANY NOTE ANYWHERE ON THE NECK, you know the 2 ways of finding a major or minor 3rd interval (4 or 3 frets up the same string, or 1 or 2 frets down on the next string) you can easily build the major or minor chord from that note, by adding either an minor3rd or major3rd interval on top of each note. 

Extending that a bit more , to get to the Dominant 7 you just add on top another Minor3rd, or to get to a major 7 you just add on another Major 3rd interval

Try that starting with A on the 5th fret of the Low E string, and find the b3,3,5,b7,7 only using minor and major 3rd intervals and you can easily build Am,AMaj, Am7, AM7 chords just by adding min3rd or maj3rd intervals on top of your current note

That gives me simple arpeggios anywhere on the neck from a note, but it is then (and with a bit of knowledge of modes) relatively easy to add in scale notes, because I know where the 1 3 5 7 notes are - I might not immediately know what the name of the minor 3rd above Ab is, but I know where it is .

Axe_meister

I've recently started taking lessons again. Was a pentatonic only player, dabbled with CAGED. However my teacher is now getting me on the 3 note per string track.
It's a killer at first as I have to undo my bad habits to be able to cleanly do some of the stretches required, but it really opens up th fretboard in a way CAGED does not quite do.

jdgm

Major scales;  the top 4 notes of one are also the bottom 4 notes of another. Cycle of 4ths. Great for practicing your chord types as well as key to understanding the major scale.

The Johnny Smith book has 2 octave major scales starting from 1st/2nd/4th finger on the bottom E, and the same starting on the A.  6 ways and lots to practice but eventually I realised by doing it I had learned all the mode positions up the neck.

Good luck!

Roland

To answer your original questions:

1) Minor Pentatonic, then add the extra notes to get the Dorian and Aeolian (notice there is only one note difference between these two. After that I’d go Major, then Mixolydian (which is Major with a flattened 7th, so only one note different. You’ll notice how few differences there are between Mixolydian and Dorian and Aeolian. 

2) It’s a starting point, but ultimately it’s useful to know all positions.

3) As you gain experience you reach a point where your brain starts thinking in terms of sound, and asks for a specific note without working out which scale it belongs to.

4) You can use open notes, especially in blue grass, but I’d avoid that for now.

5) If you learn CAGED at the same time as scales then you learn how chords and scales are related. 

GuyBoden

We can all listen and hear music, then with practice, we can train our ears to decipher what we are hearing and be able to play it. That is the main skill of a musician. The rest is mechanics.

guitarjack66

GuyBoden said:

We can all listen and hear music, then with practice, we can train our ears to decipher what we are hearing and be able to play it. That is the main skill of a musician. The rest is mechanics.

My mechanical skills are about as bad as my knowledge of scales and any car I had to fix would be a write off! That said I understand the CAGED system but can't quite make the connection between the two.

viz

I did a little pic on how to construct scales (in your brain, not on the fretboard) - I like thinking of them like this; maybe it helps others:

EricTheWeary

hollywoodrox said:

The minor pentatonic is great to get started with as it is so popular in most Genres especially rock blues & pop.  

The Major scale is to me  the key to the whole of music ,  those  8 notes in an octave 
  Can be used to build all the chords  explain intervals , write melodies  , build different flavours of scales (modes) it’s amazing & not as daunting as it sounds with the amount of media available today .

I think you do have to understand the major scale because it's the basics of all Western music theory. Even if you never played a major scale on guitar if you play anything that you want to understand the theory behind it still relates to the major scale. It's a basic vocabulary. 

The minor pentatonic is relatively simple and is 'home' for many guitarists but to use it intelligently you still need to be able to understand how it relates to the chord changes and ultimately those are based on the major scale. 

Some people like CAGED and some don't. If you watch, for example, Anyone Can Play Guitar or Eric Haugen's channel on YouTube they are playing relatively approachable pieces of music but their understanding of how to play things is based on them being CAGED players. I think Eric has a beginner's CAGED course on TrueFire. 

When I was playing in bands the value of knowing some theory was that I could communicate with other musicians. If you say, random example, 'I'm going to play this up a fret' that might not mean anything to a keyboard player or a trumpeter but they would understand 'I'm going to play this up a semitone' so some theory is that basic vocabulary even if you play the same old licks you did before. 

guitarjack66

Is it true the pentatonics fit together like a jigsaw,so the shape at the top of one is the shape of the start of the next and so on? 

viz

What do you mean?