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3rds Intervals over 5 Major Scale Shapes/Positions

I hope you are doing okay with everything that is going on now. These are crazy times, but we have to make the best of it. We have to help each other out while keeping a safe distance, be considerate of others, smile to people to relieve a bit of their burden, but with all that don’t forget yourself along the way. Being kind to yourself too. Have a bit of fun. Try to enjoy the present moment.

For those of you who stay at home, you might have some more time on your hands now to enjoy the guitar, develop a nice practice routine, and make some good progress. Well, here’s a great guitar workout for you…

Practicing melodic intervals really developed my skills to solo and improvise over major chord progressions. Just by going through the scale intervals on a regular basis you are training the muscle memory for your fingers and acquiring the vocabulary for your creative mind to help you shape your musical brain and come up with melodic ideas. It’s an exercise that is not to be underestimated.

In this lesson we are going to learn “melodic intervals in 3rds” following the major scale. We’ll practice these 3rd intervals over 5 different scale shapes/positions across the neck, so we’ve got a great workout for you! Don’t worry we’ll take it step by step.

Make sure you know the major scale in 5 shapes/positions before you start this lesson, but on the other hand you can also skip that for now if you just became excited to dive into this lesson. You can always come back to that later. I can imagine you want to try at least the first exercise to know what we’re talking about here. I totally understand.

Another upside is that the exercises will train your ear to recognize 3rd intervals. This will improve your aural skills, which is a important part of becoming an accomplished musician (Try to sing along the notes as you play the exercises). The practice of playing the intervals will also increase your dexterity. A win-win situation in many ways.

How to Play and Build Maj7 Chords on Guitar

By Klaus Crow 5 Comments

Today we’re going to learn how to play Maj7 chords and how to build them from scratch.

The Major 7th chord is a mesmerising chord which is commonly found in jazz music, but also in pop music and world music it is regularly used to express a beautiful hypnotizing or dream-like sound.

We’re going to look at open Major 7th chords (open strings involved), moveable Maj7 chords (containing no open strings) with the root note located on different strings, starting at the Low E (6th string), A-string (5th string) and the D-string (4th string), and Maj7 bar / barre chords.

First things first, let’s take a look how to build a major 7 chord.

CHORD CONSTRUCTION / ANALYSIS

Major chords consist of the root, 3rd and 5th notes of the major scale (1 3 5). The major 7th chord (Maj7) consists of the root (1), 3rd, 5th and 7th notes of the major scale (1 3 5 7). That means the 7th note of the major scale is added to the major chord.

For example, if you take the notes of the C major scale = C D E F G A B C
The Cmaj7 chord consists of the notes: C E G B (1 3 5 7)

If you take the D major scale = D E F# G A B C# D
The Dmaj7 chord consists of the notes: D F# A C# (1 3 5 7)

This way you can build or analyze any Maj7 chord:

Note: In the chord diagrams above: the black dots above the nut are open strings, and the letters in the dots indicate the note names.

Here are some popular songs that use the major 7 chord:
Old friends by Paul Simon starting with Fmaj7 and Cmaj7, capo on 4th fret.
Something by The Beatles: Amaj7 chord (second chord of the verse)
Maybe tomorrow by Stereophonics: Ebmaj7 chord (first chord of the song) Under the bridge by the Red hot chili peppers: Emaj7 chord (at the end of each verse).

How to Play The Major Scale Guitar Guide for Beginners and Intermediate

By Klaus Crow 11 Comments

The major scale is often called the MOTHER OF ALL SCALES, because all other scales, modes, intervals, chords and harmony in western music can be derived from it. It’s your main reference for all things making music.

If you want to makes sense of what you are actually playing and learn to understand, analyze, create, and be able to play any chord, progression, solo, song or anything else that involves your guitar playing you need to know the major scale. It’s equally valuable for the rhythm guitar player and lead guitar player.

The major scale is also a perfect warming up and dexterity exercise to start your guitar practice with. Two for the price of one.

MAJOR SCALE SOUND
We all know the famous “Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do” melody you learned in preschool. This is the actually the major scale we are talking about here. And it’s important that you know what it sounds like, recognize it, and know how to sing it along.

MAJOR SCALE CONSTRUCTION
The major scale contains 7 notes starting with the root note (1) and the scale is followed by the octave of the root note: 1(root) 2 3 4 5 6 7 + 8 (8 is the octave and is the same note as the root, only an octave higher, so 8 equals 1). Every other western scale, chord or progression formula is compared to and can be derived from the numbering system of the major scale: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

WHOLE HALF NOTE SCALE FORMULA
To form a major scale on a single string we use the Whole-Half step formula: “W-W-H-W-W-W-H”, where “W” = Whole step (2 frets) and “H” = Half step (1 fret). So going one fret up the neck is a half step, and going up two frets equals a whole step. You can construct a major scale on any note, and on any string using this formula.

For example: Let’s start on a G-note (Low E-string/6th string, 3rd fret), now go up a whole step to an A (note), then up a whole step to B, up a half step to C, up a whole step to D, a whole step to E, a whole step to F# and finally up a half step to G. So the notes of the G major scale are: G A B C D E F# G ( 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8/1).

If you want to know how to find any note on the fretboard check out
Learn the Guitar Fingerboard Thoroughly in 16 Days

OPEN G MAJOR SCALE
An open major scale means you are playing a major scale that also uses open strings. It’s the perfect scale for beginners, but also the intermediate player has to have this one memorized. See TABS below.

How to Quickly Transpose A Song Without Capo

By Klaus Crow 9 Comments

How-to-Quickly-Transpose-A-Song-Without-Capo There are many ways to transpose a song in different keys. You can use a capo, play a song in bar chords and then move all the chords up or down, or write down all the chords of the song in the appropriate key.

Those are good solid ways, but sometimes it’s just nice to transpose without capo, bar chords or too much hassle of writing things down.

You want to switch between keys instantly using mainly open chords, because they sound nice and are easy to play. We’re not going for any sharp or flat keys in this post. We keep things simple.

So how do you go about that?

First, you want to know how to build chords of the major scale. If you don’t know how to do that, you can check out this post. If you don’t want to get into the theory behind it, no worries, you can also read on and just memorize the chord sequences that follow. You can always read more about it after this post.

Now we start with deriving the 7 chords from the C Major scale:
C – Dm – Em – F – G – Am – Bdim
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