The major scale (Ionian)

The major scale — do-re-mi under your fingers, the reference every other scale and mode is heard against. One shape walks all twelve keys a fret at a time, then a second shape does it again, until any key is yours two slide-free ways.

One window, four fingers

Every shape on this page lives inside six frets. Your four fingers rest over the middle four, one each, and the two outer frets are the ones you have to go and get: the index slides back a fret for the lowest, the pinky forward a fret for the highest. Your hand does not travel. What changes from one scale to the next is which dots inside that window you play.

Slide the whole window up a fret and every note it holds is renamed a semitone higher, so one shape covers all twelve keys. That is the trade this site keeps coming back to: learn a shape once, then learn where to park it. If the window itself is new to you, the chromatic exercises teach it on its own before any scale is involved.

Patterns #3 and #10: no slides

There are twelve numbered shapes for this scale. The app starts with #3 and #10, and the reason is visible in the charts: neither one puts a dot on the shaded outer frets, so all four fingers stay over their own frets from the first note to the last. Nothing has to reach or slide while you are also trying to keep time.

Pattern #3 shown in G major

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Pattern #3 is one of only two major-scale shapes with no dots on the Box’s outer frets, so all four fingers stay parked over their own frets from the first note to the last — no slides, pure Chromatic Box discipline. And the shape never changes from key to key; only the fret number under it does. Learn it once and every unlock after is the same fingers, one fret higher.

Pattern #10 shown in D major

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The other slide-free major-scale shape: like Pattern #3, no dots land on the Box’s outer frets, so every finger keeps its own fret the whole run. The dots sit differently, which puts each key in a second window — usually far from where Pattern #3 plays it. With both shapes down, any key is close at hand wherever you are on the neck.

Each chart is drawn in one key, and the number beside it is the fret your index finger rests on. The dots are identical in every key. Only that number moves, which is what the twelve pages below show.

Six more scales for no extra fingerings

Take one of these shapes and treat a different dot as home, and the notes you are playing have a different name: Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian. The modes are not new shapes. They are the same dots with a different note doing the work of home, which is why the app numbers a pattern by its shape rather than by its root.

The practical version: once these two shapes are under your fingers, every mode you meet later costs zero new fingerings. All the new learning is ear and emphasis, not hand.

All twelve keys

Same dots, different window. Each page charts both patterns at the frets that key puts them on, spells the notes, and lists the chords built from them.