Whole Tone Scale

Whole tone scale is a cool sounding scale based on whole tones (duh?). Basically, if you play 1st string open, 2nd fret, 4th fret, 6th fret, 8th fret, 10th fret then 12th fret, you just played the E whole tone scale. All the notes are two frets apart. In the following example, I played the E whole tone scale using only the 2nd and the 3rd strings. That's right only those two strings. I just played those strings on all the odd numbered frets from the 1st to the 21st. Check it out.


Here is a little example of a whole tone lick that I use a lot. It just keeps going up two frets on those 2nd and 3rd strings! Click on it to get a bigger image.


You can experiment yourself with the background track.


It might not sound so cool if you ONLY used this scale when you take a solo, but if you throw it in there and mixed it up with more traditional pentatonic scale based stuff, it can sound exciting.