Imagine that, right now, you’re painting a picture. You have a selection paints, all different colours: green, blue, red, yellow, purple… In front of you is brown and green woodland. Do you just indiscriminately use all the colours available to paint the scene?

Now imagine you’re a chef. You’re trying to make a roast dinner and you have a whole kitchen full of ingredients. Would you use a bit of every single available ingredient in the dish?

Hopefully you answered no to both of these! In most creative arts it’s almost a case of the result being decided more by what you didn’t use than what you did. A cake with vinegar, cheese, beef stock, shrimp and mustard isn’t really a cake anymore – in fact, that would probably be pretty horrible.

How does this relate to music and scales, though? Well, if everyone always used all the notes they could then everything would sound the same. It would also all be pretty intense and dissonant. That’s not to say there isn’t a time and place for that, but you probably wouldn’t feel too comfortable sitting through an hour of it!

When you play in a certain key, or use a certain scale, what’s making it stand out is the notes that are missing. A major scale can be looked at as taking all the notes in an octave and cutting a few out. Let’s visualise this:

Look at the low E string on your guitar.

The note produced when you pluck it open is E and then each fret until the 12th is a unique note, at the 12th you reach E again and the sequence repeats an octave higher.

Play all these notes, fret by fret.

Now, play the notes again but miss out the 1st, 3rd, 6th,8th, and 10th frets.

Following the last step will make you play an E Major scale. Can your ears pick up a certain sound to it in contrast with playing every note? This is the point I was making about cutting out notes from the full selection. Major and Minor scales are the perfect example of “less is more”.

Figuring out major scales by missing out notes from the chromatic scale can be a bit slow in practice, though. The other way to think about scales is as a sequence of intervals; in other words you can memorise the size of the jumps instead of the placement of gaps.

Using the E Major scale we already looked at we can see a pattern:

Start at open.
Move up two frets.
Move up two frets.
Move up one fret.
Move up two frets.
Move up two frets.
Move up two frets.
Move up one fret.

You can use that, starting at any point, to form a major scale on the guitar’s neck. It’s a bit of a pain to remember though, right?

Let’s use a bit more musical knowledge to make this easier. One fret is the same as a half tone, or “semitone”, and two frets are the same as a “tone”. So, instead of talking about the pattern for a major scale as a series of instructions, we can think about it as a sequence of tones and semitones.

Pick a starting note and then follow this pattern of jumps:

Tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone.

A little bit easier than the other set of instructions but still not super compact. We can take it to the extreme, let’s say that “T” means tone and “S” means semitone.

Major Scale Pattern:

T T S T T T S

If you understand this notation, it becomes really easy to pick up more scales. Try this Minor Scale pattern – start with an open E string:

T S T T S T T

If you used it correctly you should have played the open string and then frets 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10 and 12.

Assuming you started this article without any knowledge of scales, it’s pretty cool that you now understand how the two most common scales in contemporary music are formed. The next step is to use them to make actual musical ideas.

I want you to pick a note on the guitar neck. When you have one I want you to decide whether you’re going to write In a major or minor key. From there, form and play either a Minor or Major scale based on your chosen “root” note. Now, the creative bit! Make a simple melody using only those notes.

If you manage to do it, well done! You’ve just gone from not understanding scales at all to using your new knowledge to write a simple piece of music in a key of your choice. If you continue to do this with different keys you’ll soon even find yourself able to quickly work out other people’s music without any effort.