Ok I've covered scale spellings and how they apply to major and natural minor scales. But how do you work out a scale if you don't know the notes?

Well for major scales you can follow a pattern and that pattern is:
W W H W W W H or if you prefer T T S T T T S.

WHAT!!!! I hear you cry.

Popular musicians (by that I mean musicians who play popular music rather that the latest fad band) tend to use the W H version. This is where the W stands for whole note and the H stands for (you guessed it) half note.

If you're more of a classical persuation the T stands for Tone and the S for semi-tone.

Either way the W or T means two frets on a guitar fingerboard and the H or S means one. For the purposes of this I'll stick with the W H version.

So let's apply this to the good old C major scale to see where it gets us.

C major starts on the note of C (doh!) so you go up two frets on the guitar (a whole note) and you get - a D. Another two frets and you get - an E. So that's the W W, so next comes the H, as I said that's one fret (half a note) which gives you a F (no E#). Next is another W which gives you a G, another W gives you an A, yet another W gives you a B and the last H gives you another C.

So in summary you get
      W W H W W W H
C   D   E  F   G  A  B   C

So let's try  another starting note. In this case G.

    W W H W W W    H
G  A  B  C  D   E   F#  G

Obviously helps though if you know where the notes are on a guitar fingerboard and if you know that you can actually work out loads of fingerings for all the scales.

Going back to the C major scale. The frets the notes apply to in this case are (on the 5th string)
C = 3, D = 5, E = 7, F = 8, G = 10, A = 12, B = 14 and C = 15.

Not much use though if you're trying to play something. That's why a guitar has six strings. Your hand would be moving back and forth like crazy just to play a few notes. So how do you spread that across the guitar.

In standard guitar tuning (where the strings are tune E, A ,D, G, B, E)
the strings are generally tuned so that the next string up is tuned as though you were fingering the fifth fret (one exception which is the B string which is tuned as though you were fingering the fourth fret on the G string)

So this means that you can play the scale either like I outlined above or you
can skip across the strings.
C = 3rd fret 5th string
D = 5th fret 5th string
E = 2nd fret 4th string
F = 3rd fret 4th string
G = 5th fret 4th string
A = 2nd fret 3rd string
B = 4th fret 3rd string
C = 5th fret 3rd string

Which looks like (if you don't know how tabulature works don't worry, in a nutshell the lines are each string and the number is the fret on that string you put your finger on)

E -----------------------------------------------
B -----------------------------------------------
G ---------------2-4-5-------------------------
D -------2-3-5---------------------------------
A --3-5-----------------------------------------
E -----------------------------------------------

This is just one octave (group of 8 notes). See if you can work out the rest upwards and downwards.

One of the items you'll find in this blog and also in the RGT syllabus is the concept of scale spelling. In practise this is something that can be a bit confusing so I thought I'd try and explain it here using examples.

So the first thing is 'What is a scale spelling'. Simply put this is just giving each note in the scale a number. Each major scale has 8 notes (including the octave, more on what an octave is to follow), so the numbers run from 1 to 8.

The two main things to bear in mind with scale spellings is that they are all intended to show how the scale you are looking at relates to a major scale and secondly, that just because a scale spelling might contain a flattened note it doesn't mean that the actual note you play is a flattened note (see told you it could be confusing).

Let's use the C Major, A Major and C Natural Minor, A Natural minor scales to explain this.

If you read last months scale of the month (C Major) you'll see that the scale spelling for major scales is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8. This means that the notes in the C Major scale are
1 = C, 2 = D, 3 = E, 4 = F, 5 = G, 6 = A, 7 = B, 8 = C
as they say in the meerkat add 'simples'.

Now the scale spelling for a Natural minor scale is
1 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7 8.
So if you take the 3rd, 6th and 7th notes of the C Major scale (E, A and B) and take them down a fret on your guitar So the E becomes Eb, A becomes Ab and B becomes Bb. Which means the notes for a C Natural minor scale are
C, D, Eb, F, G Ab, Bb and C with the scale spelling underneath.
1    2   b3  4  5   b6   b7         8

So what's confusing about that. Not a lot really until you apply the same logic so something like the A Major and A Natural minor scales.

The key signature for the A Major scale is 3 sharps so whilst the scale spelling remains the same some of the notes are sharpened thus.
1 = A, 2 = B, 3 = C#, 4 = D, 5 = E, 6 = F#, 7 = G#, 8 = A.

So where does the confusion come in?. Well if you take the scale spelling for the natural minor scale again to this scale you'll have to again take those notes down by a fret on your guitar. BUT whilst you're flattening a note (remember is b3, b6, b7) the notes that you're applying that to are already sharpened by the key signature (C#, F# and G#.) so what you end up with is that the C# becomes a C (not a Cb), the F# becomes a F (not a Fb), and the G# becomes a G (not a Gb), so the notes in the A Natural minor scale are
A B   C  D E   F   G  A, again with the scale spelling underneath.
1  2  b3 4  5 b6 b7 8

Once you get your head around this you can then use the same logic to work out any scale from it's scale spelling as long as you know the key signature of the major scale your applying it to.

More on key signatures later.