Scales and Chords for Dummies
R-1-1-½-1-1-1-½ m m m °R-1-½-1-1-½-1-1m ° m m
Print this out and place it somewhere you can see it when playing guitar.
The first two rows make up your Cheat Sheet for Major scales and keys.
The bottom two rows make up your Cheat Sheet for Minor scales and keys.
There are two ways to use your Cheat Sheet. I’m only going to cover the case where you know the key the song is in for this article. I’ll write another one later, explaining how to find out what key a song is in.
If you know the key the song is in, you can use the Cheat Sheet to determine what chords fit to this song and what notes are in the corresponding scale. Simply replace R by the key the song is in and fill in the rest of the notes. “1″ means you get to skip two half tones, while “½” means you only get to skip half a tone. When in doubt, one fret on your guitar is half a tone. For the key of C, you would get these two sets:
C D E F G A BC D Eb F G G# Bb
The first row are the notes that make up the scale of C Major. The second row are the notes that make up the scale of C Aeolian, which is the basic minor key.
Now that you have these, add the corresponding “marks” that are on the second row of your Cheat Sheet.
C Dm Em F G Am B°Cm D° Eb Fm Gm G# Bb
The first row are the notes we found to be in the Major scale, added with the marks from our Cheat Sheet. These are the Chords you can use over this scale.
The second row is the same but for notes in the Minor scale.
What if the song is in MelodicMinor or HarmonicMinor, other scales that are often used in Metal? Well, you simply pay a visit to my scales page which allows you to pick any scale, any key and look at the scales on the neck of your guitar. It doesn’t tell you the chords but I’m thinking about adding that.
Have fun and please let me know if you have any additions or if you found this useful.
