Ear Fusion Guitar Lessons - How To Play By Ear
The
major scale
OK…now I want you to know that you are not expected to
understand all of this in one sitting, it is important to practice
with intensity, but also be patient, if you get frustrated…take a
break and come back. Things can come to you if you come back or read
this more than once. Just be patient and understand that you can do
this. Anyway, on to the major scale. If you’ve ever had a
music class in elementary school or studied singing or anything like
that, you may be familiar with the tone sequence that music teachers
hum or sing which goes like DO-RE-MI-FA-SO-LA-TI-DO.
You may not know or be able to remember how this sounds
when sung correctly…but you’ll learn soon. Let’s look at figure 3
again here.
FIGURE 3 (Again)
As we know, this shows all of the notes on the fret
board…at least up to 22 frets…your guitar may have a couple more or
a couple less frets. What does figure 3 look like if we were to take
out all the sharp notes and all the flat notes…this is how it would
look in figure 5.
FIGURE 5
Notice that in figure 5 we have nothing but natural notes marked
meaning NO sharps or flats. Perhaps you’ve heard or known
about songs being in a certain KEY…well these are all the notes in
the key of C Major which happens to have no sharps or flats.
Remember that a half step is one fret and a whole step is two frets.
See on the bottom E string at the 8th fret…you have a C
note. Notice that when you start at C and move up a whole step or
two frets you land on a D note. The pattern is shown in figure 6.
FIGURE 6
C would be DO, D would be RE, E would be MI and so on. Hence the
sequence
DO-RE-MI-FA-SO-LA-TI-DO. Play the pattern from the C on the 8th
fret to the C on the 20th fret. Do it a few times until
you memorize it and can play it clearly. Go up and then back down to
get familiar with the sound going in both directions and hum the
notes, matching them with your voice until you can sing the DO-RE-MI
pattern without hearing it. Now go back and look at figure 5…find
the first C note on each string and play the pattern starting with
each C note and hum to them. Each time you go through the pattern
from one C to the next…you are playing 8 notes total…this eight note
pattern is called an OCTAVE. Remember, OCT- is a prefix meaning 8.
Like an octagon has 8 sides. Notice the C on the 20th
fret of the bottom E string is higher pitched than the C on the 8th
fret. That is because the two C notes are one octave apart. Remember
in the harmonic lesson how we created a harmonic on the 12th
fret of the strings which was also exactly half the total string
length? Well, when you play C on the 8th fret of the E
string, you’re making the E string shorter, that’s why it’s C
instead of E. So the notes on all the strings after the 12th
fret are the same notes on all the strings at the very first
frets…just an octave higher…so this is basically cuts your basic
fret board structure down to just the first twelve frets. In the C
Major scale or key of C…C is the ROOT note. Most songs in general
tend to be in the key of C. But some musicians and artists in
particular might use more of the other keys besides just C.
Next - Lesson #9 - Relative Pitch
