Hi, how you doing? Justin here again. In this lesson we are going to be talking about the 5 positions of the major scale. I'm going to take you through each position the way that I play it. Different guitar teachers and different guitar players have different opinions about what the correct fingering is for the five positions. Some guitar players use another system called 3 notes per string in which there are 7 positions. However, most guitar players I know seem to agree that the 5 positions system is the best one. There is no right or wrong with the fingering, the fingering I'm going to show you is the fingering that I've worked out that I think is logical, that suits me, just if your guitar teacher or someone you know plays it a different way, that's totally cool, I'm not trying to say that you should do it this way, but if you don't have an opinion, this might be a good one to start off with You'd probably only change it if you could come up with a logical reason why you should change it. So we are just gonna go for a close-up now on the left hand and just do each different scale position starting with position one. All of these scale shapes are on my website which is www.justinguitar.com so you might want to go and check that out, either download the pages or print off the scale shapes. So, yeah, I'll see you in a few seconds with my left hand, thanks Jedi! Okay, so here we are for position one. Position one we start with the second finger and play up the scale. Guitar Scale Playing Come back down Making sure we start and finish on the root note, also making sure that our fingers curve up as we go up the scale. Guitar Scale Playing Okay, now we are moving up to position two Move up to here, up to the fifth fret. Following me here Jedi? Okay, so now for position two, the root, the lowest root note is right up here on the forth string. Even if it seems a little but strange, I think it's very important that you start up here on the root note. The reason is that you will hear the major scale the, do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do idea if you start on the lowest note all of the time, you tend to hear the modes which can be useful, but right now you're learning the major scale. So we start here with the second finger Guitar Scale Playing Slight position shift here Back down the scale Now at this point, 4th finger on the way down and 3rd finger on the way up. Now, I'll just explain that odd fingering here because this is a little bit unique to me. Uhm, I got it off my old teacher. Thanks John Mc Millan, great stuff man. Uhm, and if I try and reach over here with my third finger you can see that the angle of my hand has to move to reach it. You don't really want that, especially when you start going faster. It makes it quite a pain. It's ok slowly, but once we get quicker it makes it really awkward. So, this way we use the little finger there because the little finger is already in the right place to go. We follow up here a little bit, and that's a really easy transition to make to your first finger. Now we could just cramp up here again with little finger, but it gets a bit squashy so we use our third finger still there. Our first finger can always reach back without the, you can see the flat of my hand here is not having to move anywhere for my first finger to reach back. Cause you always got more flexiblity with your first finger. So.. [plays scale] Making sure again that the fingers round up when they get to the top and making sure you watch out that funny note that changes between the fourth finger and the third finger. [Plays scale] Ok, now we move onto the third position. Ok, we there still with me Jed? Jed: Right on Cool Mate. Ok, now this one. Root note is under the little finger. It's pretty straight forward for the fingering this time. Each finger gets allocated it's own fret. Start with the little finger. [Plays scale] Pretty straight forward again. Making sure you start on the lowest root note. Up as far as you can. Down as far as you can, and back up and finishing on the root note. Ok, now we go onto position 4. Just a little farther up the neck now. K, this time we're starting with the second finger. We're playing here. [Plays scale] Again, starting and finishing on the lowest root note. Really important. [Plays scale] It's worth noticing as well that if you're playing these scales with a metronome, you probably want to get up to four notes per metronome click. And if you follow the scale shapes that I've got, you'll see that every scale form has three notes on each string except for one string which has two notes on it. I think that makes a total of seventeen notes. And what that means is if you play the scale up and down that you'll always end up back on the root note for the beat. [Plays scale] You can see that I accented each group of four then and started and finished on the same note. Ok. That was position four. Now we're going to move up to position five. Right up the neck now. Starting with our little finger on the 6th string. Play up the scale. [Plays scale] Ok now, on this girl we've go the same little trick as we had before with the third finger on the way up and the 4th finger on the same note on the way back down. [Plays scale] Ok, so please, what's really, really important. After you've finally got those 5 positions down is that you remember what I said originally in the lesson 1 for the major scale. It's really important that you can use the scales. Don't learn lots of scales and not be able to use them. There's absolutely no point. So learn position one. Learn to do a solo using the position one scale. Then learn position two and then start to join position one and position two together. There's hundreds of different ways of doing it. You can slide between them, you can shift between them. It's really a good exercise just to sit down and start playing one and try to get into position two and back. [Plays scales] Just trying to combine position one and position two. Once you feel really confident that you can combine positions one and two, then you'd add the third position and start to combine position one with postion two into three. [Plays scale] Etc... And keep joining them together. Don't just sit there and play the scales up and down. It's really, really just a not happening thing. Ok. In the next lesson, I'll show you some ways to break up the major scale. Into making it sound like music instead of it sounding like a scale, so I'll see you for part three in a minute. Cheers. Take care.