How to Play E Major Guitar Scales

Video Transcript

"RYAN LARSON: Now we're going to show you how to actually go through and analyze the tune and we do that by taking a look at the E major scale so you definitely want to write this down at home. We wrote it out in tab. You'll notice we have E here starting on the second string, 7th fret, nice and in the middle of the fret board so you can move around a lot. So we have 7th, 9th, 11th, 7, 9, 11 on the third string and on the bottom string we just have 9 and 11. So if we go up we have E, F sharp, G sharp, A, B, C sharp and if you go down from E, you have D sharp and C sharp. So you want to notate this whole thing at home even if you just write three strings and notate it as the bottom three strings. You want to start with E on the 7th fret in the second string, F sharp 9th fret, G sharp 11th fret, A 7th fret, B 9th fret and C sharp 11th fret then we have D sharp on the 11th fret on the low string and C sharp on the low string. And the importance of this is when you go to play a G chord--say you want to play G major, we'll alright, this is where G sharp is, so G major is a fret below. So you play on the 10th fret, second string and you need to apply your major chord voicing for the second string. Say, you have to play a B minor chord. So you go out to the 9th fret, third string and then you apply your minor voicing scale or tab chord that we went over. So by utilizing the scale, you can find all the chords that you're going to encounter within the tune and then you can go to that root and apply the appropriate chord. So nice, simple idea and all you have to do is really get the scale written down and write down some simple tab chords and we can go through a whole tune and we can go through a whole real book doing the same method and figure out how to play these chords in the Bossa nova style to any real book tune."