This is an exposition of the notes and intervals that go to make up a major scale and the reasons that you, as a guitarist needs to become familiar with scales. Yes, it takes dedication and practice, but scales are crucial to your control over your guitar.
When you buy your first guitar and start fooling around with it, learning songs and making up your own tunes, you kind of wonder about the need to learn guitar scales. If I'm doing okay with my own natural talent, why do I have to spoil the fun by learning a bunch of dry scales?
You need to learn guitar scales because they are your key to understanding the guitar fretboard. You really need to learn your way around the notes on the guitar so that you can give your playing some depth and variety. Take the major scale for example. The do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si-do you learnt when you were a kid. If you can find that scale in any key in any part of the fretboard, you have control over the music and you are not restricted to the basic open chords and the notes in the first position you learnt as novice guitarist.
If you hear a lick on a CD and decide that you want to learn it, you could take the hard road and try to find the notes by ear. Lots of people have learnt to play that way. But if you have taken the trouble to learn guitar scales, you will probably recognize from the sound of the riff which scale is used and in what position. If you have the sound of the scales you will recognize the intervals because your practice has made the scale part of you.
If you have the knowledge that practicing guitar scales gives you, your natural talent will give you the seed of a melody and your knowledge of the scales will allow you to quickly develop your ideas and see how your tune sounds at the first, fifth, tenth or twelfth fret. The basic point to why you need to learn guitar scales is that you can learn in a month of practicing scales what ten years of playing hit and miss might give you. Time is short.
So let's get back to the major scale. The do-re-mi scale is a bunch of notes separated by a certain number of frets. The seven notes are separated by seven intervals. The intervals are of two sizes - tones and semitones. The semitone is the interval between two adjacent frets, the tone is an interval with an empty fret between the notes.
The intervals in the major scale go like this: TONE - TONE - SEMITONE - TONE - TONE - TONE - SEMITONE. If we count each tone as two semitones, you have a total of twelve semitones in an octave. This is the material you work with as a guitar player if you learn guitar scales. You learn scales that make use of these intervals to produce sounds that are capable of producing a range of feelings in your listeners.
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