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Learn To Play Guitar – The Chromatic Scale
By Mike Hayes | March 1, 2010
When it comes to learning scales on the guitar the chromatic
scale does not receive anywhere near the amount of attention and
emphasis as common popular scales such as the major and minor
pentatonic and blues scales; nevertheless a good working
knowledge of this scale will accelerate your fretboard knowledge.
The chromatic scale
The chromatic scale (or color scale) is the one scale that
includes all the twelve notes in our music system hence the
reference to color meaning all the individual musical colors
available to us are contained in this scale.
Concept #1:
Think of an endless musical chain, each link in this chain is
a note, you can start at any point (note) in our chain and move
in any direction forwards or backwards until you arrive back at
the point (note) you started on; to achieve this you would have
to travel past twelve musical links, this is exactly how it works
on a piano keyboard and on each string of the guitar.
Taking this concept further you can see that it is possible
therefore to build a chromatic scale (loop) from any note in the
scale.
A to A playing all notes in between would be an ‘A’ chromatic
scale.
B to B playing all notes in between would be an ‘B’ chromatic
scale.
C to C playing all notes in between would be an ‘C’ chromatic
scale.
D to D playing all notes in between would be an ‘D’ chromatic
scale.
E to E playing all notes in between would be an ‘E’ chromatic
scale etc
“What about the sharps and flats haven’t we forgotten them?”
To answer that question we have to go back to our musical chain
or loop concept.
Here is a an example of a loop starting from the note ‘A’
A – B – C – D – E – F – G – A
As you can see we don’t have twelve notes only seven different
pitches, the other missing five notes that make up our chromatic
scale are sharps or flats.
Concept #2:
If you look at a piano keyboard you will notice that two pairs of
notes B – C and E – F do not have a black note in between them;
black notes on the piano keyboard indicate sharps and flats.
IMPORTANT: When creating a chromatic scale always remember that
there isn’t any sharps or flats in between B – C and E – F!
Now back to our ‘A’ loop scale, all we have to do to convert this
scale into an ‘A’ chromatic scale is to insert a sharp in between
each note EXCEPT the notes B – C and E – F.
A – A# – B – C – C# – D – D# – E – F – F# – G – G# – A
Now our twelve note scale is complete!
Concept #3:
“What about flats?” I hear you ask …
If we were playing an ascending scale we would call the notes by
their sharp names, if we were playing a descending chromatic
scale we would refer to the notes by their flat names. Still
keeping in mind that there wouldn’t be any flats between the
notes B – C and E – F.
Concept #4:
Ascending version using sharps …
A – A# – B – C – C# – D – D# – E – F – F# – G – G# – A
Descending version of the same scale using flats …
A – Ab – G – Gb – F – E – Eb – D – Db – C – B – Bb – A
Concept #5:
Enharmonic equivalent
The term enharmonic equivalent refers to notes that “look
different but sound the same”.
There are five notes that have an enharmonic equivalent.
A# = Bb
C# = Db
D# = Eb
F# = Gb
G# = Ab
Time your time to absorb the information on the chromatic scale
in this article and look for my next article on applying the
chromatic scale to the fingerboard of the guitar.
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