happy birthday tab notes on guitar in different keys

Similar to sheet music, a composer can notate exactly which notes they want played.Even beginners can work off of tabs because it tells you exactly what to play.After you are comfortable with this scale, it is time to move on to another.Mintz l, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons It is also the most used scale for demonstrating other music theory concepts, such as the Greek modes (ionian, dorian, phrygian, etc.). This is due to the lack of sharps or flats, which makes it the easiest to read and play from sheet music. The C Major scale is probably the most important scale to master as you’re starting to study your instrument. Some examples of this list (such as “Ain’t No Sunshine”) actually use the A minor scale because of the key of the song. Remember that since C Major is the relative major scale of A minor, these two share the same notes. Blue Öyster Cult – Don’t Fear the Reaper.Here are a few examples of songs that use the C Major scale: It is always good to use different resources when they are available to us.įor instance, if you’re playing a tune in C Major and the chord D7 shows up (this chord is not a part of C Major’s harmonic field), instead of playing in C all the time, the D Lydian Dominant scale is a great choice to give your solo some extra flavor.

Songs that use the C Major ScaleĪs you have probably guessed by now, there are tons of songs written in the key of C Major, and consequently, that use its major scale as well.Īlthough, just because a song is in C Major, it doesn’t mean that you cannot use other scales in certain moments, otherwise it might end up sounding a bit dull or repetitive. With that in mind, after you are comfortable with the shapes shown above (some of them are the first chords that people usually learn), you can try to learn other voicings of those chords so you can spice up your comping game. Play these chords in a sequence, listen to their different colors and how they relate to the individual notes of the major scale.Īfterward, try playing some progressions with them, you might even stumble upon the chords of a song you already know.Īlso, in order to make things a bit more interesting when you’re playing a chord progression, it is a great idea to cycle around a few different chord shapes of the same chord, just so that you aren’t stuck to the same voicing all the time. This is a well-known method of mapping out the fretboard. Important: each of the enclosures you’ll see below are directly connected to the scales/chords associated with the CAGED system, which you might have heard of already. Since you don’t necessarily start phrases with the note C all the time, and you might want to start on a lower or higher note, developing this kind of awareness is completely necessary if you want to be able to improvise fluently. Instead of showing you the scale in a specific region, these will show you the location of all notes belonging to the C Major scale in that region. The diagrams shown below illustrate one of those division methods. There are several ways to divide the guitar’s neck in order to make it easier for musicians to memorize arpeggios, scales and other concepts in different regions of the fretboard. That will help you visualize the neck of the guitar much better. See if you can connect all of these fingerings slowly as you’re studying this scale, and apply the same concept to other scales, chords and arpeggios you learn in the future. If you are working with a major scale, its relative minor will be one major sixth above it (9 semitones), or one minor third below it (3 semitones). This means that A minor uses the same notes as C Major, but the tonal center is the note A.

In this case, the relative minor scale of C Major is A minor. It simply means that there is another scale that uses the exact same notes, only with a different tonal center. In music, there is a concept that we call “ relative scales”.įor each major scale, there is a relative minor scale, and vice versa. The C Major scale is not the only one that only has natural notes though. Having all natural notes makes it much easier for someone to practice reading notated music, and also less tricky to find them on a keyboard or a guitar. Taking this into account, we have the following notes: To put it more visually, if you were to play it on a keyboard, you would only play white keys, as the black ones correspond to the sharps and flats. It has no accidentals (no sharps or flats). The C Major scale is typically the first scale that most people learn, and the reason for that is very simple. The C Major Scale: Notes and its Relative Minor Scale

The C Major Scale: Notes and its Relative Minor Scale.

Happy birthday tab notes on guitar in different keys