 Guitar and Excel. C Major, A Minor, Scale, Fret 5, Fingering. Get ready because although it's not fun to either fret or be bored, it is fun when you put them both together, resulting in the fretboard. Because the fretboard gives you something to play with, which eliminates the boredom and distracts you from the stuff that you were fretting about. So let's do it. Here we are in Excel. If you don't have access to this workbook, that's okay because we basically built this from a blank worksheet, but did so in prior presentations. So if you want to build this from a blank worksheet, you may want to begin back there. However, you don't necessarily need access to this workbook if looking at this from a music theory standpoint, because we'll simply use it as a tool to map out the fretboard, give us the notes, the scale, the chords that we're focused in on. If you do have access to this workbook though, there's currently 10 tabs down below. We've got a bunch of these example tabs. We've got an OG Orange tab and then our Practice tab on the right of the OG Orange tab. The OG Orange tab representing the original worksheet we put together in a prior section. It now acting as the starting point, going forward, mapping out the entire fretboard, giving us our entire musical alphabet and letters in number format and combining them together, letter and number format, providing a key that can be adjusted with this green cell, adjusting the key that we are in that will adjust the worksheet on the right hand side, providing us the key that we've selected as well as the notes in that key and the chord constructions from the notes in that key and some interval information. We then wanted to look at the key of C and each of the chord constructions in open position from it, starting with the one chord, the C major chord, which we did over here, open position, fret one through three on the fretboard. We mapped out the one three five of the one chord, the C major chord, discussed it in detail. We then went to the four chord, which is the F chord. We dropped to the F chord because it's going to be a major chord construction in the key of C. We went to the five chord, which is the G chord once again because it's a major chord construction, discussed it in detail. We went back to the minor chords then the two chord, which is going to be the D minor chord, discussed it in open position, then the three chord, E minor chord, discussed it in open position, then to the sixth chord, the A minor chord, discussed it, and then we went to the seven, the diminished chord. So the chord built off of the seventh note of the C major scale. We then want to move from our chord analysis to a scale analysis and to do that we're going to jump from the open position to the middle of the guitar fret five, and that's basically where we are at this point in time. So here's the open position we were working in with the chords, and if we put all those chords together we basically come up with this pattern that all the colored notes here will create this pattern in open position. Now we want to start working out a different place in the guitar and we're going to start working right in the middle. I'm going to delete some of these things here and that's going to be the fret number five. So we're going to start in fret number five, well that's what I usually would think of it, although there's going to be one little note over here in fret number four in this particular pattern, and we'll map out it in terms of a scale this time so that we can then learn the top of the fret board in kind of a scale format where we already have the open positions in more of a chord type of format and then we can start to combine these together. That's the idea. Now in the prior presentations we looked at the pentatonic scale, so we looked at fret five. Here's our classic pentatonic shape noting that this E string up top is the heavy string, the one closest to the ceiling on the guitar the way we have this mapped out. So this guitar is going just straight from top to bottom. If we're on fret number five it's just going boom boom boom boom boom boom boom. So here to here here to here and then here to here and then here to here. That's our classic type of pentatonic position that everybody loves. We can move it around like the chords. It's a movable shape but if we play it here in fret five then it'll match up to the C major chord or a major chord constructions that we've been working in on and we can just basically tie it in beautifully to the open chords that we've been learning. So if I scroll down we're now going to look at the same thing. We're just going to expand it to now pick up the two notes that we're missing before and those are going to be the the that'll give us the whole scale. So let's first hide everything on the left the open chord position and then we'll unhide that later. So I'm going to go from A to D right click and hide all of that. I'm going to minimize or shorten the screen or make it smaller a little bit so I can see the the related minor over here. So notice when we look at this major chord construction we've added the two notes so we have the five notes in the pentatonic and now we're adding the two notes for the major. Remember when we looked at the pentatonic we mainly think about it as being a pentatonic which we can tie to the major pentatonic or to its related minor. The related minor we can then put over here which is basically the Aeolian mode and just all the same notes all the same scales but now it's in the minor mode. So the six over here would be the one over here. So the pentatonic can be thought of as the C major or the related minor in this case the A minor. When we play other chords using the pentatonic we can do that we can if we're playing in the key of C and then we go to playing a D minor chord we can do that but this note right here if we're playing the pentatonic will not be in the pentatonic shape and that's fine. We could then target that note we could say well I'm still thinking of myself in the pentatonic shape if I want to if I want to then target and then target that note that I know is outside of it but I want to pick it up when I'm kind of noodling around or you can try to shift you know the whole scale positions in your mind which we'll talk more about basically in future presentations. So when we go to the major scale however now we have all seven notes so that means that everything that we've constructed all these all these chords are going to fit in the major scale construction now we're just building the major scale construction rather than an open position we're looking at the pattern that results I usually think of it at fret five is that middle position although again we have that fret four that B that's kind of hanging out on the right hand side so one so the first thing that most people would want to do is think okay now I'm just going to extend my pentatonic pattern which we've learned last time so everybody the pentatonic pattern is great because it's only got two notes per string and we saw that the rule on the pentatonic pattern is there's never two notes right next to each other with the pentatonic and there's only two notes per string so and you always have this long short you can think of it as long short here's the shorts here's the short here's the short here's the long here's the long I missed the I missed that first long but you see what I'm meant to do so so now we're just going to add add the other notes which the other notes will result in situations where we could have three notes per string we still have some situations that sometimes might have two notes per string so usually when you add the next note most of them are going to now have three notes per string most patterns will have three notes per string and then have one particular area where there's only two notes per string the pattern the other pattern that's useful to note is that although you will have notes that are next to each other you're not going to have a a note where you're expanding we have to reach more than one two three four you know a nice comfortable fingering position so I'm going here one two three four frets four frets this is only three frets across and then although I have to back up going over here it's still only four frets once I back that finger up to pick up that B and then we have the four frets here and the four frets here now you could try to finger this a you know a couple different ways but I think most people will you will take their normal finger in here that they did their pentatonic width so and then just add add the other notes to it so we had the pentatonic going on the first one boom boom so I'm just gonna do the same thing but now add the B so now it's going to be going the first string and then the second string this was the the normal pentatonic and now we're adding the F so these first two shapes you'll see the similarity again just like we saw with the pentatonic where these shapes start to kind of group themselves together you so you start to see this pattern and then we'll go to the next one notice this one is the weird one in this shape when you look at the major because there's only two notes on that string so we go from a G to an A only two notes on that string and then when we had the normal pentatonic we went down here to the C and we had two notes but this is the funny one where we have to shift our fingering back so when I go down to that string I'm going to shift my fingering back boom and then pick up the three notes per string so if you remember that there's three notes per string basically all the time except for usually one one string shape on each of the pentatonic patterns then that'll help you to to remember it's like okay well where's that two string one it's here so that means this one can't be just this it's got to have three notes and it's like well and the three notes cannot extend beyond four frets so it's either if it's three notes I can go it's either this or it's this right and then you can start to kind of see how that fits together and then down here we have the pentatonic which were the long shapes but now we have this added note here so boom boom boom and then down here we have the long shape which was simply that and now we have this added B again so we have the added B here so boom so those are going to be the added notes so it's useful to be able to see the pentatonic and be able to play it separately and then add the notes that are the blue notes this when I made them blue they're not the blues notes for like added blues notes these are the major notes not like that's the added blue note they're just blue because they're the major scale that's just the other color that I chose uh so usually you want to see the pentatonic within it because that's your safest zone so if you're moving from from chord to chord or something like that the pentatonic like if you're in the key of C and then it moves to the to a D chord but you're playing a song in the key of C the pentatonic's probably the safest place to be uh and and play around there right and then you can add in the the other notes when they're applicable uh as well if you're on the key of C then they'll typically you would think all the notes would sound good in the in the key of C if you're in some of these other notes if you go to a D then you might start to target again that F so remember when we saw the pentatonic we basically said you could still think of it as a pentatonic but now you're like targeting that you're targeting the F because you're on the D minor chord and you know that F will sound good because that's the three note of that chord or you can just say I'm just gonna be playing in the C major scale over the top of all the chords that I'm basically playing you still want to target basically the F and the D and the and the A the notes that are in the the D chord when you get to the D chord but all of the notes that are in each of these chords will be in the major scale you kind of want to separate in your mind you might say well if that's the case why don't I just learn the major scale because that concludes everything and you could kind of do that but again it's kind of nice to know the pentatonic within side it because there are particular uses where the pentatonic itself just playing the five out of the seven notes is useful now as far as picking this this and playing it then you're going to learn it from top to bottom everybody does it that's not the most musical way to do it but that's kind of where you know you start to do it so you're just going to be and then when I get to this one I'm going to shift back this one noticed that I have the two fingers together on this side it shifts up here but I still have the half step on these first two fingers which is kind of useful to note and this bottom string remember that if you can get this top string which most people do because we start playing these scales top to bottom so the first thing you're going to learn is that string if you have that string you know the bottom string is the same okay and then if you know the bottom string is the same you might some ways you might kind of think about it this particular shape is one in which the bottom string has like the opposite pattern then the one above it with regards to the half step so right the half step here there can only be four notes on on these pentatonics they're going to span four notes so they're nice and comfortable with the finger this one had the half step from the ring to the pinky and the one above it has the half step from the pointer uh the pointer to the middle so that's kind of useful it could help you to remember and then the G here when I move up again I still have this pattern because notice these patterns clump together so these pattern this pattern and this pattern is basically the same except it's it's kind of kinked because of the because of the difference in the uh the uh the interval between these two notes so it has to go back one so we're going back one but the pattern still the same in that it's the half step after the pointer right so you got the pointer uh the middle and then uh the ring on that one so a couple things that could help to remember so the top two patterns are basically the same so you can say this one is pretty comfortable pattern so you got boom boom boom so that's going to be the pointer to the ring to the to the pinky pointer ring pinky and then you've got that unusual one where you only have two notes on the string so you can target that and say okay that's the only time that happens and then you've got that funny shift that has to go back I'm going to go back to this one and these two patterns are now going to be basically the same right so now I have this pattern but it kinks up so the patterns the same down below but it kinks up so I'm going to go down here and that those two half steps are the same and this bottom string those are the only five unique strings because the bottom string is just the same as the top right so bottom string is the same as the top and then you go back into this into this pattern it's going to kind of another kind of looping kind of concept so it's going to go back into these this pattern uh up top so that's the general idea then of course you're going to want to practice this piece by piece and just see what you can do musically with it this gives you more information to it so if you're just trying to get your fingers used to this then you have a whole lot to do just in like two strings because like just one string now I can so I'm just doing one string right now and if you add the open string it's a little low but you can kind of get away with it and if you walk it back you know that g is okay as well because remember we played a g and that fits in our structure so that so if you remember that g is there you can play just one string get some pretty interesting rhythm stuff now notice when I whenever I'm playing I'm usually targeting that a right now because that's that's the starting point so so it's kind of resolving back to a so when if you're just playing chaotically and you don't know where you're ending it might not set it might be harder to just noodle around with it if I'm targeting one particular you can target any of the notes right because you can you can then pretend that you're playing uh that making you know the the c the root or or the b the root that'll be harder in in but any of these would be a root that you can basically target so but probably to start off it's targeting the a is being easy and then if you add the string below it then of course you have you have almost infinite options here so again this is a power chord from this a to this e so that's like a good place to start and then it's just natural to put your pinky up there that kind of completes the a so right a e and then you've got the the the the c which is the a e c which is basically the minor or so so I'm just holding this finger down so that I can get those two to ring out and I can play them individually I can put this finger down and play that one I can pick up this finger and I can pick up that c the ones that are going to sound good if I'm targeting this a is going to be this one this one and this one are kind of like my home positions or closer to home positions because those are the notes that are in the chord when I'm kind of thinking like I'm in an a chord I'm just shuffling around that I can add that g you could do double stops two strings at a time two strings at a time two strings at a time you could do slides so there's actually a whole lot of stuff you could do just in one place and just kind of learn that one place and then you could you know move it up move it up and learn the next one down so if you're learning this one here you you might actually target the a which is down here now that that might be the easiest thing to do if you're still kind of working in the a right or you can try to target any any notes you want like I could make it a D and then I'd be kind of like playing D Dorian because remember all these notes will work in any mode so I can basically try to make it a Dorian we'll talk about how to do that more but so if I say well I'm going to make that my center position notice I can make that a power chord again power chord is always this this D to that A so I can target any note I want in here it's just that the A minor is probably the natural one for people to start targeting this is a this is this is a a box that is really useful and now we could just expand it so this is probably a place that we play a lot because right in the middle of the guitar so it's a perfect position now all we're doing is adding that that B so if you're thinking of yourself in the key of A I'm targeting this A right there and then I'm just going to noodle around and I'm going to add that note and it might be good to slide up the B to the C you can adjust your finger in if you want all right and then I'm gonna and you could target any any note you might target that G right here and say notice I can hit an open string as well because these all these open strings are in my key so and then you can target down here so you can kind of say okay now i'm going to target these ones and so this is that one where you have that funny so it's kind of the opposite of each other so you could you still have a power chord right here so so you can kind of noodle around with with each of those positions then you might start to see how can I combine the notes together right so like double stops or if I play anything like if I played these you know these three notes or something and they're in they're they're all within the key I could start playing well what if I did like I played like these three notes together and then I played like these three notes or something I was just like I'm just going crazy I don't know what I'm doing and I'm playing them one at a time or whatever and then and then maybe I'm like oh well maybe I'll like try to finger these two because that looks kind of like an A like maybe that looks kind of like an A shape like right here what if I did that and then like I don't know what if I move that up to here so that I played like that C but then like these two notes like that C and in these two notes and then I was like I don't so I'm not trying to analyze what I'm playing right now you can you can analyze the chords we'll do that later but you can play any combination and you will be playing something that is in a key right I could well what if I did that you know up here and I was like hold down this G and then like well I played like these two and then I was like well what if I moved that position over here and I was like I hold down like then I can hold down that A and then I was like and then I can hold down these like go back and forth between them and then I'll try to close it on my A right I'm just trying to so you could play so I'm not trying to analyze what I'm doing I'm just saying all of that stuff should work because I'm trying to see it as a scale but then think about how I can play stuff within it in terms of different orderings of the chords I'm going to play and then different combinations double stop and then combinations of three strings and then later on we'll get into say well what are the actual chords that you can construct from this shape which you'll probably naturally kind of do you'll kind of if you're just messing around with it by ear so we can learn it both ways right so over here we learned everything by chord shape and then we'll put the scale on top of it over here we're learning everything by the scale and then we'll put the chords on top of it right and so we'll do that so we'll do that in future presentations now if you unhide if I go from E and I unhide this stuff so now you've got your shapes on the right hand side and then again you can try to tie them in to your shape over here and when you do that you want to target something now on the minor pentatonic scale we said it was good to like target an A for example because the minor pentatonic scale is in the key or the key of A or C generally right a lot of people will say this whole shape is still a minor shape because you're going to start an A minor but as we'll see when we map out the fingering or the intervals you can still see it as a C shape or you can see it clearly as any of the other modes because this shape is going to include all of the notes for any of the other modes that you create so you can just like we did before where we basically looked at all these chords and we said I'm going to try to make that chord the center then then you can do that same thing over here so if I'm playing in the key of of A I might try to say okay I'm going to start with an A in open position and then I'm looking for the A's over here which is there's an A here and there's an A here and there's an A here so then I'm going to target I'm probably going to target this one and see if I can get there and then I'm going to maybe zoom up to here but now I've got this added note so now I'm zoomed up to here and I but I can be like instead of just playing the pentatonic I can add this F right so I can be like home to the A right and I can just so same thing I was doing before but now I'm just adding a few more notes when I'm noodling around and then if you're targeting if you're target you could target any other note if I'm targeting like a like if I want a D minor right so now I'm saying okay well there's my D and then there's a D and that open string is a D which is nice so I can be like okay so my D shape looks like this so again I could follow my lead finger because that's the that's my easy pivot finger to pivot with so I can say okay where's my shape up here right there there's my ending note and notice that open D right there is useful when you're playing in the key of D D minor in this case right or D or whatever but because then that open note you can always follow that right so so I can follow this open note here and ring that out as I'm following following up if I wanted to play the D here I could just jump up here and then go down to my D right there that's just the power chord you can always end on a good old power chord here to here here not there there here to the A there's another D and then I can always ring this D out while I'm playing these bottom strings I'll follow the D back D this is D string I kind of cheated I went on that note I shouldn't go on there it should be I'm playing the door anyway so you can you can play with any any of these notes the C would be the other the major note right so if I had a C here then you've got a C here and you've got a C here and you've got a C here so you could target the C's so you've got the C's so if I was playing a C ready I don't know we'll get into we'll get into each each of the notes and more detailing and target each of the notes in more detail in future presentations but if you're just kind of noodling around that's what that's what you can kind of do and you can you can if you're playing in the key of C for example any any note in between what you're playing so if I'm playing from like a C to an F to a G back to a C anything in between just like we said any of these notes is open meaning I could take my fingers off those are all fair game because we're playing in the key of C so are all of these notes up top so it's fair game up there too so if you were and you just jumped up here so you could kind of jump up and back and try to pick these notes up in between what you're playing but it will sound more musical if you can kind of lead into it instead of just jumping up there and it's also going to sound more musical if you're picking the notes in here that tie into the basically the chord that you're playing even though all the notes should kind of work so it doesn't sound as scale ish and that's what you kind of do when you practice one one at a time like here's my I'm going to target ending on the A right here's my C maybe a target ending on a C right and here's I have target ending on an F basically and you can kind of work back and forth that way now just one other thing I wanted to mention on the naming convention I would still call this position one so now we said this is a pentatonic up top we said this was a pentatonic now I'm going to say this is a major scale position but it's in the middle of the guitar these are the same notes as we played an open position so what am I going to call this well I would call it you know the major scale construction and the key of A minor or C or any of the any other of the of the modal shapes that you want to call it but most people will see it in the A minor and I would think of it as starting on fret five even though again we have this one hanging out basically in fret four so if you were to name this I would probably name it like this is the position one A minor or C major scale starting on fret five right that's basically or you can use the the the caged system because that G shape still fits in here right so you have the G shape here here so notice that this G shape and we say it's a G shape it's a G if it was an open position right so we have that G shape if it was an open position it's now a G shape that creates a C chord but you could still call it a G shaped position however I just realized that it's not this the fact that this position this G shape fits here in the major scale is not unique it will fit in like three other positions as well because because even though the shapes around it will be different so it will be unique if you're talking about just the caged system just the notes itself or the pentatonic I believe will have a unique shape that's why you can still name the pentatonic shape by saying well I'm going to I'm just going to build the added two notes from the three note chord and call it a pentatonic shape built off of the G shape so I'm going to I'm going to use that as my key to show me where I am on the fretboard it's the key of C G shape G shape pentatonic you can also say it's the key of C G shape major scale and people will still know you know that you can use that to target but don't get confused to think well that means that if I find this G shape fitting in any major scale construction that means that it's the same shape it's not because because when we add all seven notes there's going to be I believe three shapes where this G chord will fit in it so if you're going to use this as a targeting mechanism you have to make sure that you see it as this particular shape you're using that to target you the one chord which was which would be unique if you tied it to the pentatonic shape and then you build the added two notes around it right so so again there's no perfect some people find that very it is very confusing all right but there's no perfect way to name to name them that if you name that just shape one not everybody does that if you use the caged system people a lot of people don't like that because it sounds because you're using a G thing to name a C chord and they find that to be confusing so what you really what I find would be best to do with those kind of things is try to learn all the different conventions because then you're connecting more things together in your mind which is which will help you to kind of understand it better you'll be able to communicate it better and and so and that'll be like and that'll be like a win-win right a win-win spend a long time since we've had a win-win and it makes me make me want to sing a song of win-o-win will we have another win-win win-o-win will we have another win-win win-o-win will we have another win-win any case well next time we'll continue on with this