How to Play G and D Scales on Violin

Hi there, welcome to onlinelessonvideos.com. You’ve made your way to the intro for the bluegrass package of tunes that are in the key of D and G. So this is a combination of two keys for the six tunes. The tunes themselves are Angelina Baker, Arkansas Traveler, Soldiers Joy, Whiskey Before Breakfast, Blackberry Blossom and the Big Sciota.

So all of these tunes again are in D and G. So let's take a look at our G scale and we can play all these tunes in the first position. So, we’ll stay in they first position for this G scale. Remember G scale is pretty simple. You take you G and your D string and you can play a full scale on these strings. So you start off low G—

[Demonstration]

And you check, that’s your G at the end and you want to check, make sure everything is in tune—

[Demonstration]

Everything sounds pretty good. So you continue on from there—

[Demonstration]

You're in there on your G, that’s on the E string. There are some other notes that will come or not. We’re going to leave first position here but we will go ahead and play an A—

[Demonstration]

It's a full space up and then another full space for your B—

[Demonstration]

So we go down from there—

[Demonstration]

That’s your G scale and then if you get really good at this and you're very confident playing in the key of G, it's going to be a lot easier on you for these tunes. Also, it's going to help you into a way of coming up with an improv within a tune once you're really competent inside a scale. So get familiar with that G scale. The D scale, we move everything over. Think of shifting everything over a string. So we start on the D now. We play the two strings scale—

[Demonstration]

Streak those notes—

[Demonstration]

It sounds pretty good. We continue from there D—

[Demonstration]

We’ll stop at the B for now, although your next two notes, you just have a C# and a D. But that would be leaving first position. We won't get into that today. So that’s your D scale. Now, some other notes included, we’re not going to start on D. We’ll start on G. We’ll look at the other notes that are within the D scale, G—

[Demonstration]

A—

[Demonstration]

B—

[Demonstration]

And then you want to make note of that C# that comes in in the key of D. So C# at your third finger on the G string and you want to stretch that to that # position—

[Demonstration]

It's going to be a difficult note because you're reaching all the way across and you're kind of flattening it out your finger to reach it. So that’s the C#--

[Demonstration]

And then you just continue on—

[Demonstration]

Okay and you're on D. So again, get to know that D scale really well and you're going to have a lot more success playing these tunes that are in the key of D. So I hope you enjoyed this lesson. Let's get going.