C Major Scale Guitar Lesson: How to Play (Theory and Charts)

The C Major scale is an absolutely essential guitar scale, and the most common musical scale as a whole!

This scale opens up a whole slew of popular chord progressions, licks, and will ultimately help you understand the song structure of a wide variety of popular tunes.

C Major Scale Guitar Lesson

C Major Scale Notes

There are 7 notes in the C Major scale, and all of them are natural notes!

There are 7 notes in every major scale, and these are the 7 in C Major.

C Major has no sharps or flats. This makes the scale’s notes easy to memorize.

Remember it as the first 7 letters of the alphabet, but start from C.

C Major Scale Formula

The formula for the C Major Scale and every other major scale is 1-2-3-4-5-6-7.

C Major Scale Intervals (Half and Whole steps)

The half and whole step sequence for the C Major Scale and every other major scale is:
W-W-H-W-W-W-H

C Major Chord

The C Major Chord is the root chord (the 1st chord) in the C Major Scale.

Relative Minor of C Major

The relative minor of C Major is A Minor.

How to play the C Major Scale

You can play the C Major Scale on guitar by finding the C note and following the major scale formula, which results in the notes C-D-E-F-G-A-B.

Doing this can result in dozens of different shapes and positions.

Some of the most common major scale guitar shapes are the CAGED shapes and 3-Notes-Per-String shapes.

You can see these shapes and positions below.

C Major Scale CAGED Shapes and Diagrams

These positions for C major are all derived from the CAGED system.

This system uses the 5 most common guitar chords, and builds the scale shape around them.

Open Position (C Shape)

This scale chart shows the notes in the open position of C major.

This is position 1 of C major.

For the rest of the shapes in this lesson, each note in the C Major scale will be shown using a number, which indicates the degree of that note in the scale.