Name: Improvising In Major Is Insanely Fun. Here's How To Do It! [GUITAR LESSON]
Uploaded: 2026-02-12T06:01:58.000Z
Duration: 16 min 50 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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If you've ever enjoyed that sweet, soulful sound from artists like Eric Johnson or the Allman Brothers or Jerry Garcia, that's the major scale that you're loving so much.

A lot of guitarists ignore the major scale.

It's just for classical music and nursery rhymes.

And in this lesson, I'm going to show you how much fun it can be to rock out and improvise with the major scale if you know what you're doing.

Our first step is to get familiar with this scale shape.

And if you watched the last lesson, this shape should look suspiciously familiar.

I highly recommend you do watch that other lesson, because everything we're doing here is going to build off of what we learned there.

To keep things simple, this shape generates major scales.

So wherever we start, that's what major scale we're going to get.

And the weird part about this is we're starting with our pinky and we're starting on the fifth string.

And now we play this shape and we get the G major scale automatically and it's moving.

So if we moved our pinky to G sharp, we all of a sudden get the G sharp major scale or the A.

So now you can play any major scale in history.

And with that knowledge, what I want you to do is download the free G major jam track that we're going to be using for this lesson.

The link is below in the description and like I said, it is totally free.

But if you're supporting these lessons through Patreon or through my site memberships, I've also made this two page PDF which summarizes the most important parts of this lesson.

Once you've got the jam track, turn it on, get your fingers ready to play in G major, which means we're going to do the shape on the 10th fret and do exactly what I taught in the last lesson.

Go up the scale, go down the scale, repeat yourself, do scale patterns, let some notes ring out, and

I want you to just experiment before I tell you what to do.

I want you to get familiar with the flavor and the tastes of the G major scale.

And most importantly, I want you to get familiar with the tempo.

I've set things up pretty quickly here, so about as fast as most people can down pick, that's how fast I've set this up.

So If I play the scale in down picking, 2, 3, 4, and back.

I think most guitar players with a lot of practice can get that speed going just with down picking.

If you can already do that, learn to alternate pick the same thing.

So to demonstrate, I'm just going to get messy now.

Not a lot of thought of what I'm doing playing around with different speeds.

Just kind of getting into it before I try to plan anything out.

So the most important thing is staying on time.

then maybe from the top, some of those scale patterns we learned before.

So same techniques we learned before just applied here to the major scale.

We haven't even learned anything advanced.

Now that your hands are dirty, your next step is to find the chord tones of G major.

This is the G major scale, but the notes of the G major chord are extremely important.

You've seen the G major chord, and it only has three notes.

Believe it or not, it only has the notes G, B, and D.

And we can find those notes extremely easily.

Right here we have G, B, and D. And then here's G, B, and D again.

So we get the notes of G major just by knowing that shape, which means we also know the notes of any other major arpeggio.

So here's moving my finger to A. I start my pinky on A.

We're only using it right here in G. But outside of this lesson, practice it in different spots.

And what I'd like you to do now is start playing through the G major scale on your guitar.

But really stop on these chord tones and listen to how nice it sounds when we take all of these notes and we stop and really focus on those chord tones.

And this is your first kind of goal, is don't worry about the jam track just now on your own.

Just improvise some melodies that really focus on the G major scale.

But more importantly, focus on the chord tones of the G major chord.

Once you can do that, go back to the jam track and start messing around again and getting your hands dirty.

But really focus on hanging out on those chord tones whenever you can.

And what I want you to experience firsthand is that even though the chords are going to change in this jam track, we're going to have a G, we're going to have an E minor, we're going to have a C and a D.

Even over those chord changes, these notes are still going to sound good.

So this gets to one of the biggest questions guitarists have is they say, am I supposed to change, you know, over every single chord?

And I want to prove to you first, you don't have to.

You can actually just get away with playing the G major chord tones the whole time, and

they will still sound good over all of those other chords.

I'm really going to be harping away on these G major chord tones.

That's really all I'm playing is the G major chord tones.

You're not supposed to ignore the chord changes, but you certainly can.

And that's the point that I want to get across.

But as a guitar player, you really want to be thinking about the chord changes and thinking about what.

What's happening underneath and can I better match that underlying chord?

For example, my jam track goes from G to E minor.

You already know how to play the notes of an E minor chord, and

you know that those notes exist nice and neat in the shape that we're already using.

So what I'd like you to try doing is matching that chord change.

When the G major chord comes up, try to focus on these four tones.

But when the E minor chord comes up, focus on those chord tones instead.

And when you do that, you might get something like this again.

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Improvising In Major Is Insanely Fun. Here's How To Do It! [GUITAR LESSON]

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