Putting the patterns together

Here's a picture showing relationship between the two major scale patterns discussed previously:



These are in C major, so the notes are all the natural notes. The pattern with the green background has root notes on the 1st and 6th strings—I'll refer to this as pattern 1. The pattern with the blue background has root notes on the 2nd and 5th strings—I'll refer to this as pattern 2.

More major scale patterns

The last post about showed an F major scale and highlighted the use of an easy major scale pattern and how that pattern sits between what I have called the tritone pattern. F major differs from C major by 1 note—the B which is flattened in F major and obviously is natural in the C major scale which uses only the natural notes. In the following picture the difference between the pattern for F major (from the previous post) and the pattern for C major can be seen where I've raised all the green notes up a semitone:



Learning the C major scale would be valuable step in learning all the notes on the guitar fretboard. Here's a version of the above pattern with a few tweaks to clean it up a bit:



This pattern is also framed by the tritone pattern at each end, and because of that there are duplicate notes present. Typically if you were playing this as a scale you would choose to play only one of the duplicates in each octave. So it could be played in two obvious ways:





This pattern and the one from the previous post can cover the entire fretboard. They can just be stacked up using the common notes from the tritone pattern at each end. Hopefully I'll get around to showing this in the next post.

And for my next trick...

You can see that the major scale pattern I described in the last post can be combined with the tritone pattern from the post before that to get this:



The green notes are the 4th degree, while the blue coloured notes are the 7th degree of the major scale. A thicker border around one of these coloured notes indicates that it's part of the major scale pattern.