Major Scale

What Is The Major Scale?

The major scale is a scale that sounds joyful, happy, and appreciative. It's used a ton these days in modern music.

The major scale starts on a root note (in this case, "A"), and has 8 notes total -- the last note being an octave from the first note.

Who Gives A Sh*t?

The major scale is the big kahuna. The big daddy of all musical scales and theory. Seriously, if there's one scale you should commit to memory, it'd be this one.

It's important to have working knowledge of the major scale because all other scales and many other music theory concepts are based off of it. As a result, memorizing the major scale is a really good investment because it'll make all the other scales easier to understand and memorize as well.

Knowing your scales will be important when you begin improvising in a few lessons. You'll eventually use these scales to know which notes on your guitar are the "right" ones to play.

Major Scale Formula

The major scale starts on a root note (the note you want your major scale key to be in) and has a specific pattern of whole and half steps. EVERY single major scale key adheres to this pattern.

The pattern is as follows: Whole, Whole, Half, Whole Whole, Whole, Half.

That's 2 whole steps, followed by a half step, and then 3 whole steps, followed by a half step.

Pattern Problems

If you're a normal human being, the problem with being presented with this information is that these distances are so arbitrary that it's highly unlikely you're going to memorize this pattern just by repeating it to yourself over and over again. Furthermore, knowing the major scale up and down one string isn't super useful -- it's a lot more helpful to know the major scale across the strings as well.

But there's a solution - the best way to really learn and memorize the major scale is by learning to construct it, so that's exactly what we'll do.

We'll start by building the first major scale box pattern together from root pattern one, then you'll do the others. We won't concern ourselves with note we're choosing as our root note just yet -- the point is just to learn the major scale box shapes by applying the formula as much as possible.

Constructing Major Scale Box Pattern 1

The first step to constructing the major scale across strings is knowing how whole steps and half steps are formed across them. Luckily, there's a pattern for this too -- let's ask our llama friend what he knows about it.

Whole & Half Steps Across Strings

Whole Steps

Half Steps

The exception to the patterns are the same as what we've learned about for how the strings are tuned. The 3rd/2nd string pair is the only one that differs.

Major Scale From Root Pattern 1

Now that we know how whole/half steps work across strings we can start building the major scale. Let's construct the major scale from root pattern one:

Major Scale Box Pattern 1 - Middle

Let's start by applying the formula (W W H W W W H), ascending up from the lower root note. The whole/half step distances correspond to the distances between the blue notes. Make sure to pay attention to the cross-string jumps!

Great! Now we can use the major scale formula again (W W H W W W H) to finish the box pattern ascending from the top root note:

Major Scale Box Pattern 1 - Top

Major Scale Box Pattern 1 - Bottom

To finish off the box shape, we can use the major scale backwards (H W W W H W W), descending from the lower root note:

Major Scale Box Pattern 1

Hurrah! Putting all these together, we get Box Pattern 1 for the major scale:

Practice: Constructing Major Scale Box Patterns 2 - 5

Now that you know how to construct these box patterns, here comes the fun part - practicing building them on your own from the other root note shapes. Doing these will really help to solidify the concepts we just talked about.

Start at each root note and click the frets to unveil the correct major scale notes.

Remember: W W H, W W W H.

Box Pattern Recap

Sick! By now you should be an expert on the major scale pattern because of how many times you've just used it to create our major scale box patterns. Let's do a quick review of all the boxes:

You'll eventually want to memorize all these boxes. We know it seems daunting, but don't worry -- just take it one box pattern and one step at a time. For example, start with the first root pattern shape and memorize the pattern on the first two strings. Then after a couple of days, memorize the next two strings, and so on.

Connecting The Dots

In our last lesson, we talked about how root patterns are all interconnected and repeat up and down the fretboard.

Well, since these major scale box patterns are laid on top over root patterns, this means that the major scale box patterns repeat up and down the fretboard as well. Let's take a look:

Notice how the notes on frets 12 & 13 are equivalent to the ones on frets 0 & 1 because the box patterns cycle again.

By eventually learning all these box shapes and how they connect, you'll gain fluidity up and down the fretboard. Basically, you won't have any more questions on what notes are and aren't in the key that you're playing in.

Speaking Of Keys...

You're probably wondering why we haven't really been caring about which root notes we're picking. So far all we wanted to do was make sure we understood the major scale formula, memorized the box patterns, and knew how to connect them all through root patterns.

Next lesson we'll go into why you can't just play any major scale box patterns starting any fret to a song. We'll learn how it depends on what key a song is in and we'll talk about how root notes are a factor in this.