Vai & Lennon Guitars
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Major Scale

The Major Scale also know as the Diatonic and Ionian Scale is the building blocks that create the chords you play and hear in your favorite songs today. The key of the scale is determined by the first note of the pattern also referred to as the Tonic note. You can recognize this scale because it produces an emotion of happiness. I hope that this lesson will help you to realize how important it is to learn the Major Scale as it will allow you to improvise with other musicians, and create solos for your own original compositions.

Understanding The Major Scale Patterns

In order to understand the Guitar patterns that make up the Major Scale, here are a few things you will need to know. Whole steps and whole tones are equal to two guitar frets, and half steps are equal to a semi-tone or one guitar fret. The formula that makes up the Major Scale is as follows WWHWWWH. These Whole and half steps make up the seven notes of the scale, musicians will add the the octave or tonic to the scale for resolution. By adding the octave note it helps the scale resolve and sound more pleasing to the ear. Because all of our major scales contain the seven notes and the tonic octave we often associate the numbers one through eight to each of the eight notes. The numbers one through eight have been designated what we call scale degrees. There are two places within the scale where we have semi-tones, they are between the numbers 3 and 4 and 7 and 8. Each of these eight notes in the scale have a name. Take a look at the below table to get a good visual idea representing what we have covered so far.

Example: C Major scale
C D E F G A B C
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Tonic Supertonic Mediant Subdominant Dominant Submediant Leading Tone Tonic