If you are a visual person, here is a different picture that may help you to get the scales concept clear in your mind. Come back to it if you find you are getting confused as you work through the lessons.
Imagine that you are in the stairwell of a multi storey building. There is a flight of stairs connecting each floor. As you walk up or down the stairwell you count the steps. You discover that there are 12 steps between each floor. This means that if you start at the foot of one flight of stairs and go up 12 steps, you will be at the foot of the next flight. Or if you start on the 3rd step of one flight, 12 steps later you will be on the 3rd step of the next flight.
This picture is a metaphor for our scales and octaves. Step 5 on the 2nd flight and step 5 on the 3rd flight are “octave steps”, and the “scale” is the set of the steps you take (up or down) to get from one to the other. A five foot person might touch down on every step and create a “12 stride scale”. A six foot six walker might only touch down on every second step, and thus create a “six stride scale”. And the bank robber being chased by the police might get from one landing to the next in only two strides. A different kind of “scale” again.
In the last lesson we learned the basic concept of a scale. Our next lesson focusses on one picture scale, the major scale, which is the most important scale in all forms of Western music.
(Need help interpreting the guitar tab symbols used throughout this site? Click here)