Hey Friend,
Sorry about the obscenities yesterday. I was upset and got a little emotional.
Tom Petty’s passing was a punch to the gut, so last night I did something about it.
I took some time to pop into my Guitar Tricks account and go through song lessons for Breakdown and American Girl.
There are lots of really cool licks in both songs that give nice contrast to the vocal melodies, and maybe we’ll look at some of those as we dig deeper into the scales and using them to create melodies.
Speaking of melodies, let’s review what we know so far…
The best key to learn in the beginning is C major because it uses only natural notes - notes that are not sharp or flat. Another name for sharp or flat notes is accidental notes.
In other words, the C major scale uses the major scale pattern perfectly with no accidentals. The only other scale I’m aware of without accidentals is the A minor scale, but we’ll come back to that later.
So C major is our base camp, and the pattern always creates the major scale perfectly, regardless of starting notes.
Let me be a bit more clear. The pattern works perfectly for the key of C for the natural notes. But it works equally as well for any other major key - they just introduce accidental notes. Look at this.
Key of C major:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8)
C D E F G A B (C)
| | | | | | |
W W H W W W H
Key of A major:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8)
A B C# D E F# G# (A)
| | | | | | |
W W H W W W H
Do you see what I mean now? It’s a different key and scale, but the same pattern is used to create the scale. And it always works. Check it out - here’s the key of D major:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (8)
D E F# G A B C# (D)
| | | | | | |
W W H W W W H
Okay, your turn. I’ve given you three major keys here. I want you to list out the four remaining keys for the natural notes E, F, G and B. I’ll give you the answers tomorrow.
Now you might be thinking, "why do I need to know this stuff, Davey? I just want to play some songs!”
It’s true, you don’t need to know any of this to be a musician. Heck, I didn’t know any of it when I was actively playing in bands.
But I’ve said it before, once I learned about how these notes interact to form melodies and chords, it’s like someone removed a blindfold from my eyes and opened up a whole new world.
Getting these patterns into your finger muscle memory will do serious benefits to your playing, and knowing how the major scale sounds trains your ears to know exactly when a note doesn’t work in the context of a song.
So don’t cheat yourself. Do the homework.
An here’s a practical exercise you can do to practice the intervals between the notes of the C major scale. Let me know if you have any questions.
Have a great day, and Rock On!
Peace~
Dave
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