Lesson #074, Building Basic Scales and Chords I

Hi Everyone,

In these next series of lessons we are going to discuss scales and chords and their basic use in Bluegrass and in other types of music as well. Its important to understand the basic construction of scales and chords if we want to take our understanding of the fingerboard and our understanding of Improvisation as far as we can.

To review a little bit of past lessons, lets start with a chromatic scale and talk about the twelve notes we have to work with in music. If we start at the third string picked open and continue up twelve half steps we have played a chromatic scale. A chromatic scale is a scale that ascends or descends in half steps ( the distance between each fret is a half step). We can play a two note chromatic scale or an infinite number of notes and call them chromatic as long as it moves in half steps.

Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti is a seven note Major Scale. I think everyone is familiar with this scale. It is a very very very important scale. We can do tons with this basic major scale. If you look at the chart in the video you will see that the scale is numbered. We can get a lot of information from that chart and will explore it in future lessons.

The scale is numbered from 1 through 7 under the scale. When the scale comes back to Do..... the number goes to 8 and then upward from there. The numbering of the scale is going to be important in our understanding of the fingerboard and in chords and many other aspects of playing the Banjo.

David