How to Play Major Scales on Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Mike Lais. On behalf of Expert Village, today we are going to be talking about getting familiar with the guitar. When it comes to scales, the major scale is probably the most common one out there and it's probably going to help you with what you need to be doing the most. The major scale is fairly simple to play on the guitar. I'll give you a pattern here that will go anywhere in any key that you can do. For example, here is the scale in E. I can take that same shape and move it up a couple frets and it's the same shape, just a different scale, or a different key. It doesn't really matter where I start, it's still the same thing. So the best way to explain this is we're going to start it out in E and then we can move that anywhere we'd like. So you take the scale, start out with your open E string or your sixth string, your lowest one. Now you want to place the second fret of that string and then we're going to go up to the fourth fret of that string, and now we're at a situation where I can either go up a half step to play the next note but we're at the fifth fret which is the same as the open fifth string, if you remember from before. So I'm going to do it that way just because it's the easiest and most efficient way I think. So here we're at the fourth, we want to go up to the open string, we want to go the same thing, second fret, fourth fret, and now we're going to want to do the first fret of the fourth string, just like that and then we get to Do or we get to the E again by moving up one note. And that's our E scale. To strum it is very simple. You just want to, it's three notes per thing. And that's our major scale."