Another way of working out scales. Scale patterns

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.