Electric Guitar Lesson 10 - Minor Scales

By far the most used scales are the major and minor scales. The minor scale isn’t much different from the major scale. In fact if you play the major scale from the 6th note to the 13th note, you would have played a minor scale. Minor scales give a sad feeling to music as opposed to the major scales' more happy feeling. If you want to play emotional, gloomy music, you will want to use a minor scale. There are many minor scales to learn, but the first one you should learn is the natural minor scale. If you learned the major scale and are comfortable with it, then this lesson shouldn’t be very difficult. Actually, you will find it is just changing a few notes of the major scale to make the minor scale.

The Pattern

When you are learning to play the guitar, you should get used to patterns. There are many patterns in music and guitar especially. Since we are working with a scale, we will use a pattern of whole and half steps. The pattern is W, H, W, W, H, W, W (W = Whole, H = Half step). So if we lined up this pattern with the chromatic scale, we can figure out what notes are in a minor scale and put them on a fretboard to get a more visual pattern.

 

This is the minor scale pattern put underneath the chromatic scale. The Am (lowercase "m" means minor) scale is a great way to teach the minor scale at first, because there are no accidentals (sharp or flat notes) to mess with.  Remember, each note of the chromatic scale is one half step. So when you play a whole step, you will have played two half steps. From the A to the B is a whole step and from the B to the C is a half step.

Minor vs. Major

There are 3 notes that change a scale, minor to major or major to minor: the 3rd, 6th, and 7th notes. If you took a major scale and made the 3rd, 6th, and 7th notes a step lower, or flat, then you would have a minor scale. Likewise if you lowered the 3rd. 6th, and 7th notes of a minor chord you would have a major chord, but that is for another lesson. Let's look at the Am scale on the fretboard.

 

Here is the scale chart for the Am scale as well as the TAB. This is a typical minor scale pattern. Whatever note you start on will be the name of the scale; in this case, it is A. Since the pattern of notes after the A matches the minor scale pattern, it is a minor scale, thus the name Am. If you started this scale pattern on the note G and followed the pattern for a minor scale, then you would have the Gm scale. So take this pattern and play it with all 12 notes and bam! You have 12 minor scales.