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Hello! Welcome to this JustinGuitar course on mastering your major scales! This is great fun stuff, and if you work on it a bit, it will really open up your guitar playing, allowing you to use scales to compose and improvise music.

To do this, we’re going to learn five major scale positions that relate to the CAGED System on the guitar. This teaches you how to use the scales and put them all together to create a tune. We’re going to be learning everything in the key of G, and it really helps to practice these scales with a backing track in the proper key.

Practice Tips

Firstly, always practice SLOWLY! Try to play it as perfectly as possible before speeding anything up, even before practising with a metronome.
Secondly, get into a practice routine of some sort. Personally, I like using a practice chart to track my progress as it really does help to keep things moving along nicely.
Third, understand the difference between playing and practising. Practising involves paying close attention to everything you’re doing and being quite deliberate and slow. Playing is more easy-going and flexible. Overthinking while playing is not a great thing!
Finally, be patient with yourself! These are things you’ll be working on for quite some time, so don’t push yourself too hard. These are pretty fundamental skills, too, so you want to make sure you spend a good amount of time on them to drive them into your head - and into your fingers!

Music Theory

Just a little bit of music theory can go a long way when talking about scales and chords, so bear with me briefly!

As I said, we’ll be learning everything in the key of G major, so we’ll be working with the group of chords that come from the key. There are seven notes in each key, so seven chords as well. Any group of the chords in a key will take on the notes of the corresponding scale. For instance, if you’ve got a song containing chords in the key of G, such as G, Am, C, and Em, you can use your G major scale to build melody lines over those chords.

If you want to get into understanding this on a deep level then check out my Practical Music Theory Course!