Five Major Scale Patterns
Tutorial Part 1
The subject to this tutorial is a warm up that you can do using five positions of the major scale and when you are working on memorizing scales especially covering the whole next that you can use it, when you are improvising and playing solos. Using it as a warm up, is a great way to reinforce it everyday and just using as low as 10 or 20 minutes to work up a scale and really get it under your fingers and then your head, rather than spending two hours on it at one time which you have it memorized for a couple days and then end up having to review it again.
So let's start up by looking at these five positions of the major scale. We will start our in the key C and then we will look at some applications that you can use in your warm up down the road. So, we will start with this lowest position of C major. We will be looking at this shape.
Look at the fingering. I have got the third fret and the fifth fret on the fifth string and you want to try to keep your hand in a position that makes sense. So I am using the second finger and the fourth finger. Then the second fret, third fret and fifth fret on the fourth string and then the second fret, fourth fret and fifth fret on the third string. Then you shift up first fret and you are playing the third fret, fifth fret and sixth fret on the second string and then there is a stretch here.
We have got the third fret, fifth fret and seventh fret on the first string. You can also stretch up one more fret to get back to the root on the eight. So when you first start memorizing the scale, you want to be able to play it up and down and if you can't use some alternate picking with your right hand as well, because that's a great habit to have in your right hand. Now there is some notes that go down below this root, so we can go to the second fret on the fifth string, the fifth fret on the sixth string, third fret on the sixth string. Then you can stretch down and grab that first fret if you want and then back up. So if we were first learning the scale, a great thing to do is just start with this one position.
This may comprise your whole warm up on a given day, if you are first learning it and you just want to run it up and down, but always begin and end on the root. That will keep you in control of where your key is and where your root note is. So you can just run that for a few times and even just the act of learning it, since you start up by playing slowly, we will get your hand warmed up to start out with and then as you get faster and faster at it, you incorporate your other positions and some other techniques.
So in our next segment we will look at the remaining four positions and then some additional applications, we can play using these scale fingerings.
The entrance starts on the lower string and it goes like this. So then it's the B, A and C I keep these string ringing on the G throughout the whole thing.
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