How to Play the Major Scale in Jazz Guitar

Series Summary

Music is one of the primary forms of communication on Earth. Whether the use of tones and melodies developed before, after, or in conjunction with spoken language is unknown; yet music is unique in that it helps us to talk to each other in ways that language cannot achieve. Jazz music was born in New Orleans as Dixieland; and it had an instantly recognizable swing and swagger to it. Since then, it has developed into a style of music particularly suited to improvisation, and a lot of jazz musicians use the form as a backdrop to play more freely expressed riffs and melodies; to expand on general musical themes. Thus while having an increased risk of chaotic polyphony, bordering on discord, jazz opens the field for the musical explorer to go forward.

Jazz guitar music, in particular, is rooted in minor 7th chords and diminished 3rds; its sound is as distinctive as any in the jazz family. Would you like to learn how to play the guitar? Learn from one of our experts for free online!

In these free online video guitar lessons learn how to play Jazz Guitar from professional guitar instructor John Armstrong. Watch these videos and learn how to play the major and minor scales, basic triad chords and diminished & augmented triads, as well as how to play dominant and minor seven arpeggios; learn how to harmonize using the major scale, and learn blues style and the natural minor scale.

Video Transcript

" Hi! My name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com. I am a professional guitar instructor and today we are going to be studying beginning jazz guitar. Okay to start off with today in our beginning jazz guitar lesson, we are going to start off discussing the major scale. Remember that in jazz guitar that a big part of your job is playing chords. Chords are all based from the major scale. We create chords by combining and altering notes from a major scale and put chords together in chord progressions often according to a major scale. So the first steps towards understanding the major scale is to be able to play them. The step pattern for a major scale is whole step, which is 2 frets on a guitar followed by another whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half so whole whole half, whole whole whole half. I'm going to play that across the neck of the guitar. I am going to be using a G major scale for example but this would be a movable major scale pattern. Here it is a G starting here to the third low e-string. That was ascending, now descending. I could play that same scale pattern here an A note and I would have an A major scale. Okay. That's a one octave major scale taking that same pattern and moving it over here to the 5th string creates another major scale pattern. Here for example would be a C major scale. A D major scale and so on and so on. "