Scales are essentially what melody lines are created from. Try listening to your favourite songs and identifying which key it is in by which notes in the scale are used. Looking at our first lessons, we can see that once you find the key, you can find which chords are in the song, and in no time flat you should be able to identify either the melody line, or the chord progression.

Practice some solo improvising using the notes in the scale patterns over its corresponding chord or a simple chord progression. Sometimes you can stay in the same scale pattern throughout a chord progression, while other times you might need to switch scale patterns to the corresponding chord.

The best way to practice these scales is just to play them over and over and over and over again. Work on hitting each note cleanly before ever trying to build up speed.

In my basic guitar theory lesson 2, we learned the pattern that every major scale was based on (remember the WWHWWWH), and in lesson 3 we learned that the 6th note of the scale was the relative minor. Knowing this, we have a new pattern for our minor scale. Before, the C scale (CDEFGABC) had the first formula applied to it. Now that we know that A minor is the relative minor of the C scale (6th note in the C scale), there is a new formula for the A natural minor scale (ABCDEFGA) is – WHWWHWW.

We know that each note in the scale has a certain number value (also called degrees or intervals) assigned to them. Since there are three types of minor scales—natural, melodic, and harmonic—the thing that makes them different are their intervals. The natural minor scale degrees compared to the major (C Natural Minor compared to C Major) would be

C Major: C D E F G A B C
Intervals: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

C Natural Minor: C D Eb F Gb Ab B C
Intervals: 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 b7 8

The natural minor has flattened 3rd, 6th and 7th notes compared to the major.

C Major: C D E F G A B C
Intervals: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

C Harmonic Minor: C D Eb F G Ab B C
Intervals: 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 7 8

The harmonic minor has flattened 3rd and 6th notes.

C Major: C D E F G A B C
Intervals: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

C Melodic Minor: C D Eb F G A B C
Intervals: 1 2 b3 4 5 6 7 8

The melodic minor has only a flattened 3rd note, however that is only when going up the scale. Going down the scale, the melodic minor is the same as the natural minor.

Once again, try searching for the most common scale patterns and using them to improvise over your favourite songs and identify the keys they are in.

Learning the major and minor scale patterns will drastically help you when improvising and creating your own melody lines over chord progressions.

Practice makes perfect.