Beginners’ Lesson

Okay guys, this month we’re going to dig into a little bit of theory and take a sideways look (isn’t this column always a sideways look?) at how to think about the notes in a Major scale. More often than not, when we learn and practise scales, we tend to focus on playing them from the root up to the octave, and less often, back down again—as we can see in Example 1, below. Try this yourself a couple times before we have a look at variation.

Example 1

Playing the scale like that is a good way to get the pattern under your fingers, and to learn what it looks like, but it doesn’t really correspond too well to the range of shapes and patterns we’re likely to end up needing to know and play.

One of the ways that we can expand on this is to break up the sequence, and today we’re going to start