By Rudi Samborski

What you need:

1/ To have completed TUTORIAL #1

2/ A guitar

3/ 40 minutes of your time

Scope: In this tutorial, you will learn two kinds of minor scale. You will be able to relate them to each other and a major scale by adjusting your starting position rather than changing what notes you play. You will continue to form chords by extracting notes from the scale as before.

Experience Level: Some experience & playing ability will go a long way. If you can play scales with confidence, that is ideal.

Method: The intention of this & subsequent tutorials is to gain maximum applied understanding from minimal study & practice. Therefore nothing that follows should be 'skipped over'.

PART #1 MINOR SCALES

As in the last Tutorial, we continue with a table of scales. Table #1 shows the chromatic and C major scale once again, this time extended to 2 octaves of C major. Beneath this is a Minor scale of A.

Again blue highlighting shows where the notes of the scales occur within the chromatic one. If we play these hightlighted notes (1 to 7) between A and G we are playing an A minor scale.

1/ All the notes of A minor share the same highlighting as C major, therefore these 2 scales share the exact same notes. So why do the two scales sound distinct and different? By shifting the starting & end points of course, and by begining at A we get a different pattern of intervals. It is only our perception of where the 1 lies that makes any difference at all.

2/ Note that A is the 6th of C major. This is a constant, meaning that by finding the 6th of any major scale, you establish the root note of the relative minor one. It works just as well the other way around of course. The 3rd of this minor scale will be the root note (1) of the major one. Study table #1 to see how this works. Its easier to understand that way.

Table 1

This pattern of intervals identifes the above minor scale:-

tone, semitone, tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone

In the A minor example in Table #1, you can see that the 7 notes of the scale are A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The 3rd = C, the 5th = E etc.

As with the C major example in tutorial #1, the above pattern of intervals is a template for the scale. Choose your starting point, apply the 'pattern of intervals template', and you can find this minor scale in any key.

In this example, we know A minor shares the same notes as C major, so we can borrow from our C major guitar phrasing to practice A minor scales. Your fingers have learned the phrasing for one key already. It is much easier to adapt it rather than drilling all new phrasing into those fingers. Is this cheating? Yes it is, but be careful you dont outsmart yourself by soloing this way too early! Try to remember where the root note is at all times.