Starting the G scale

The easiest scale to play in D tuning is the D scale.

The easiest scale for a baritone like me to both play and sing in D tuning is the G scale. So I'm starting there.

The first note I'm going to play and sing is B also known as "Mi". It's dead easy as the first or bottom string is tuned to B. So we pluck the note and sing "Mi" until we have them lined up. Then we're going to start playing the notes on the staff that I wil post below.

Okay, we're also going to cut ourselves some slack. Let's not fool ourselves into thinking this will all be easy because it's just one note. It's hard to pat your head and rub your stomach at the same time. Well, what we are going to do here is like patting your head, and rubbing your stomach and planning our grocery list at the same time. We'll go real slow. We'll tap our foot and count to four in our heads with each tap. As we do that we will play the notes for the required durations: quarter note gets one beat, half note gets two and whole note gets four.

Meanwhile we are quietly learning to read music—one note at a time. Here is the music:

Click on that and you will get a larger image.*

The important thing here is to take our time. We want everything right. We want to sing and play the same note at the same time, at the right time and for the right number of beats. So, as boring as this may sound, we want to keep at it until we get it right.

And then we can add a second note. This is re or A and we play it by fretting the second string (counting up from the bottom) on the third fret.

And then, when we have mastered the two, we play them together. Now, you will notice I have given this thing a name. That's not just a joke. One of the things we want to get right from the beginning is that we are always playing music. We want to play and hear these things as music. There should be no exercise so mundane that we won't treat it as music. So let's try and get music out of this:

We could stop there but it wouldn't feel like a scale if we didn't have Do yet so here is Do or G. We play it by fretting the second string on the first fret:

And then we'll play our three notes altogether remembering that we have to  play it and hear it as music. As we practice this we're going to start hearing the notes as a flow or as a series of phrases.

And that ought to be enough to keep us busy for a few days. As I said before we are not going to stop playing for fun. We're just going to take a chunk of every day to go back and master the basics. Maybe twenty minutes. And we will always sing and play the notes at the same time.


* Go ahead and print out any of the music you find here if you want. There is, obviously, nothing original in this image. It is work to do this, however, and there will be considerably more work as I go along. If you decide to share anything you find on this site with anyone else, please credit me and give a link.