Guitar scales and modes: the only shapes you need, and why the chords decide

These are the only scale shapes you need to learn. Learn them and you can play through all major, minor and modal music. That is not a simplification to make you feel better — it is what the fretboard actually is once you stop treating every key as a separate problem.

What follows is the set of worksheets I give guitar students, written out properly. Four shapes, one idea holding them together, and the reason the idea matters more than the shapes.

The idea first: the notes do not decide the flavour

Play these three things:

• F# minor
• A major
• C# Phrygian

They contain exactly the same seven notes — F#, G#, A, B, C#, D and E. Not similar notes. The same ones. If I gave you those seven notes on a page you could not tell me which of the three scales I meant, and neither could anybody else.

So what makes one sound wistful, one sound bright and one sound like a flamenco guitarist walking into the room?

It is the chords that decide. The harmony underneath tells your ear which of those seven notes is home — which one is the root — and the moment your ear picks a home, the other six arrange themselves around it and the flavour appears. Change the chords and the same seven notes change character completely, without you moving a finger differently.

That is the whole lesson. Everything below is just where to put your hands.

One neck, one set of notes, four doors in

Here are those seven notes everywhere they occur on the first seventeen frets. The brackets are the four playing positions we are about to learn — not four different scales, four windows onto the same thing.

Guitarists spend years believing there is a different scale for every key and every mood, and the neck stays a fog. There is one pool of notes. The shapes are how you reach into it from wherever your hand happens to be.

The major scale (Ionian mode)

Three notes on every string, and the same fingering repeating in pairs. Root on the sixth string, which is what makes it movable: put the root on the fifth fret and it is A major, on the eighth and it is C major, on the third and it is G major. The shape does not change.

Play it up and down slowly, then play it against an A major chord ringing out, and listen to how settled it sounds. That settled feeling is the sound of the chord and the scale agreeing about where home is.

The natural minor scale (Aeolian mode)

The same seven notes, entered from a different door — the one at the second fret, on F#.

Same notes as the shape above. Completely different mood. Nothing has changed except which note you started and finished on, and which chord is holding the ground underneath.

The Phrygian mode

The Spanish-sounding one. Flamenco lives here, and so does a great deal of metal, which is a pairing that surprises people until they hear it.

Its character comes from one note: the second degree is only a semitone above the root. That half-step is the sound. Play the root, then the note one fret up, then the root again, and you have just played the entire personality of the mode in three notes.

You have also just played the guitar part of "London Calling". The musicologist Joe Bennett has a whole page of that flattened second in songs you know — Motown, Björk, Sam Smith, The Clash — which is a quicker way to get the sound into your ear than any diagram.

Now the chords — the part that actually does the work

Each scale gets its flavour from the chords played underneath. Here are the three, in the key of the diagrams above.

F# minor

The chords of F# minor are F#m · G#dim · A · Bm · C#m · D · E. In practice the diminished chord gets left alone — it is the one I cross out on my chords-and-keys sheet — and C# major is very often borrowed in place of C# minor, because that raised note pulls back to the root much harder.

Try this, four beats to a bar, round and round:

| F#m | Bm | C# | F#m |

Play the F# minor shape over it. That is the sound of a minor key.

A major

The chords of A major are A · Bm · C#m · D · E · F#m · G#dim. Same seven notes as the list above, same chords in fact — reordered, because a different one is now home.

| A | D | Bm | E |

Play the identical major-scale shape over that. Bright, open, resolved. The notes did not change. The gravity did.

C# Phrygian

Phrygian's progression is built on the root and the chord a semitone above it. As a pattern: i · ♭II · ♭III ♭II · i. In C#, keeping the key of everything above:

| C# | D | E D | C# |

And here is the same pattern down in A, which is where most people first meet it because it sits under open chords:

| A | B♭ | C B♭ | A |

Play that once and you will recognise it instantly. It is the flamenco cadence, and it is doing nothing more exotic than leaning on a chord one fret above home.

What about all the other scales?

Diminished scales, whole-tone scales and the rest are real and they are worth meeting eventually, but they are genuinely rare in rock and blues, and learning them early is a good way to spend six months getting no better at the music you actually want to play. The four shapes on this page, plus the chords that go with them, will cover almost everything.

The one addition worth making early is the shortened version of the minor scale — five notes instead of seven — which is where nearly every guitar solo you have ever loved comes from. That has a page of its own.

How to practise this so it sticks

1. Learn one shape properly before starting the next. Up, down, eyes shut, no buzzes, in time with something.
2. Always practise a scale against a chord. A scale on its own is a finger exercise. A scale over a chord is music, and it is the only way to hear what the scale is for.
3. Move the shape. Play the major shape rooted at the fifth fret, then the third, then the eighth. Say the key out loud each time. That is how the neck stops being a fog.
4. Draw it. There are blank fretboard diagrams among the printable sheets — five seventeen-fret necks to a page, one for each shape. Drawing a shape from memory, root ringed, is a different test from playing it, and it shows you at once which bit you only half know.
5. Then throw the shape away and use your ear. The shapes exist so you stop thinking about where the notes are. If you are still thinking about the shape while you play, it is not learned yet.