[MUSIC]
I'm going to give you a movable fingering right now for a G major scale.
Now as you play different scales, or as you move some of the fingerings around,
you're going to realize that of course the sequence of letters changes.
And sometimes you're going to wind up with some sharps,
sometimes you're going to wind up with some flats.
That's how we determine what's called the key.
The key of C doesn't have any sharps and flats.
And the key of G, we're going to wind up with one sharp.
I'm going to demonstrate that for you right now.
So, we start off with G,
A, B, C, D, E, F sharp,
and then back to G.
Now, you might ask, well, why isn't this G flat?
Well the rule is you go to the next letter name in the alphabet.
G, A, C, D, E, F sharp,
in this case, and then, G.
So that's one octave of a G Major scale, and that one is in second position.
The reason why it's second position,
is because my first finger is sitting on the second fret.
In this case,
I don't have to do any finger stretches beyond the four fret span.
We're going to play another octave on top of that.
So we're going to do a two octave G major scale.
G, A, B, C, D,
E, F sharp, G,
A, B, C, D, E,
F sharp, G.
Now we're going to descend.
G, F sharp, E,
D, C, B, A G,
F sharp, E, D,
C, B, A and G.
Now this is movable fingering, for a G Major scale with two octaves.
I'm going to play this again, this time with a metronome.
And you can play along with me this time.
I have my metronome set to 60 beats a minute.
One, two, three, four.
[MUSIC]
Descending.
[MUSIC]
Now, that was a G Major scale played in second position.
That was a moveable fingering.
And what that means is we can take that fingering and
move the first note to a different root,
and play another major scale starting on a different note,
with the same sequence of half steps and whole steps.
So we're going to take that G Major scale and
we're going to move it up a whole step, and we're going to start on the root of A.
And we're going to play exactly the same fingering.
And you can see that as you look at the fretboard maps, I'm going to play the same
fingering, but this time, we're going to do it in the key of A.
And what we're going to realize is the sequence of letter names changes,
and we have a different number of sharps or flats.
In this case, in the key of A, we have three sharps.
So we start off with A, B,
C sharp, D, E, F sharp,
G sharp, and we are back at A.
One more time.
A, B, C sharp, D,
E, F sharp, G sharp,
and we're back at A.
Now we're going to practice this with our metronome ascending and descending, and
we're going to use alternate picking for this.
One, two, three, four.
[MUSIC]
One more time.
[MUSIC]
That was an A Major scale.
And that one we are playing in one, two, three, fourth position.
As we move fingerings around and start on different roots,
notice that there's a different sequence of letters.
But also a different number of sharps and flats.
The number of sharps and
flats are how we determine what's called the key and the key signature.
So that was an overview of major scales.
Having an idea of the fundamentals of theory is great.
But in the meantime, while you're trying to integrate all of that knowledge, what
you have is the fret board maps, and that gives you an instant access to the sound.
So you can practice the scales and you can get them under your fingers
while you're assimilating all of the other knowledge.