Beginners’ Lesson

Welcome back, guys! I hope that you’ve been having fun this past month experimenting and playing around the intervals of the major scale. For this issue, we’re going to take a look at the minor scale, and a few other pattern options for building bass-lines using the notes in the scale. Firstly, let’s take a look at the scale we’ll be using this month—the D natural minor, starting on the fifth fret on the A string.

Example 1

Notice the one flat in there, a B b (that’s the sixth note of the scale), and changes the sound considerably from the scale we’d have if we played the B natural. That would be a Dorian mode, and is derived from the major scale, starting on its second degree. Notice that without that B b , we’d have no sharps or flats, and would therefore be in C Major. The addition of the B b means that our ‘relative’ major key is F Major. And indeed, if