Theory Thursday: The A minor scale

Chromatic Scale Recap

So you already know from the chromatic scale in the previous chapter, that a scale is just a collection of tones.

The chromatic scale is a bit of an oddball in that is really has no beginning or end; it's just EVERYTHING, and it doesn't even matter which tone you start from. Pick a tone and play every single tone up the neck until you've started repeating.

Review: Chromatic Scale

While we do need to know what the chromatic scale is, you can see it's not terribly musical or useful. Let's just agree right here and now that if you understand that the chromatic scale is all of the 12 tones, you already know enough about the chromatic scale.

Let's move on to something more interesting!

The A Natural Minor Scale

Before you get worried that this course is going to turn into a silly list of useless scales, I want to make it clear that we're going to focus on ONE single scale for quite some time. This new scale is called the A natural minor scale — for now we'll just call it the A minor scale. In time, we'll bring back the "natural", but for now it's not important.

One of the characteristics of the A minor scale that makes it quite different from the chromatic scale is the concept of the tonal center. The tonal center of a scale is the most important tone in the scale. Out of the collection of tones that make up the scale, the tonal center is the tone that our ears want to hear the most.

The tonal center for the A minor scale is "A" — hence the name. If we were to talk about any other scale, for example, D major, F♯ lydian, or G minor, the tonal centers for these scales would be D, F♯, and G, respectively. Scales are named after their tonal centers. The chromatic scale has no tonal center, thus it doesn't have a tone in its name.

Unlike the 12 tones of the chromatic scale, the A minor scale has only 7 tones. If you've ever recited the English alphabet, you already know A minor:

A B C D E F G

That's it! No sharps, no flats, no tones with more than one name, it's just a repeating set of the tones A through G. If you've got a keyboard handy, it's just the white keys.

On the guitar, we're going to learn to play the A minor scale a few different ways. Our long term goal is to be able to play the tones in the A minor scale all over the fretboard of the guitar. But for now, we're going to learn two different ways of playing the A minor scale.

Exercise A: Three tones per string A minor scale starting from 5th position

In the preceding exercise, the A minor scale repeats once, and the tonal center (A) is indicated by accent marks (>) on the note heads.



Exercise B: A minor scale laterally on each string

Exercise B is also the A minor scale, as it falls on each of the 6 strings. The diagonal slash indicates where you should slide positions. I recommend you use your pointer, ring, and pinky fingers for the two groups of 3 tones — and use your pointer finger to guide you as you glide from one position to the next — and use your pointer and ring fingers for the highest to tones on each string. So on each string it will go like: "pointer, ring, pinky — slide — pointer, ring, pinky — slide — pointer, ring".

Lesson Review

• What is a scale?
• What is a tonal center?
• How can you tell what the tonal center is of a given scale?
• What tones are in the A minor scale?