The very first thing I think any aspiring lead guitarist should learn is the major scale.

This should be learned to cover the entire fretboard.

Learning just one position of the major scale just won't cut it, and that goes for any other lead guitar scale as well.

Anyway, that being said, let's move on to figuring out just what this major scale is, and how it looks.

We'll start with the C major scale as that gives us all the information we need to figure out how any other major lead guitar scale is going to look on the fretboard.

The C major scale is all the white notes on a piano.

First off, we need to understand the note intervals in the major scale.

Note intervals are describe as tones and semitones.

A semitone is the equivalent of one fret spacing, so if you play the E open string, and then put your finger on the first fret, you've just played a note one semitone higher.

A tone is made up of two semitones, so obviously, if you put your finger on the second fret, that would be a tone up from the open E.

A tone is also sometimes referred to as a whole tone.

Okay, so what intervals make up the major scale?

When we look at the C major scale, especially if you're looking at a piano, you can see that all the white notes have black keys in between them except for two.

In the major scale all notes are a whole tone apart except for B and C, and E and F which are a semitone apart.

So the C major scale intervals are, starting at C and ending at C; tone, tone, semitone, tone, tone, tone, semitone.

The notes are C D E F G A B C (Music notes only go as high as G sharp, but this being the C major scale, there are no sharps or flats)

Okay, this is all very nice in theory, but let's get down to putting this into action on the guitar, so you can start playing some lead guitar with it.

We're going to start on the sixth string, which is the thick E string (The one closest to your face).

You play open E, then 1st fret F, then 3rd fret G.

On the fifth string you play open A, then 2nd fret B, then 3rd fret C.

On the fourth string you play open D, then 2nd fret E, then 3rd fret F.

On the third string you play open G, then 2nd fret A.

On the second string you play open B, then first fret C, then 3rd fret D.

On the first string you play open E, then 1st fret F, then 3rd fret G.

When practicing this scale, a good idea is to pick up down up down and so on.

What you'll want to do a little later on, is work out further patterns from this along the fretboard.

Working the rest out yourself will help a heck of a lot with helping you to memorize the fretboard and scale patterns.

The really cool thing about guitar scales is that the pattern remains the same when you change to a different key. Only the position changes.

So if you want to play in the key of D major for instance, you just play the same lead guitar pattern but shift it 2 frets higher.

In this example, what used to be all the open notes, will simply be played on the second fret, and all the other notes will also be two frets higher.

I hope this helps you get started.