Today we have selected the D major scale. It is a very friendly scale and very good for the bass note method.
If a song is in D, there is one advantage: when you play the D major chord, the 4th string (D) and the 5th string (A) are freely available as bass notes. These will be very useful in this scale.
So first, let us understand the scale. We can play D major in many places on the guitar, but we will play it from some specific positions that will help us in fingerstyle and also in taking bass notes.
If we talk about the notes, the first note will obviously be D. This is B string, 3rd fret (B3). If you understand Indian sargam more easily, you can call this Sa. Otherwise, in guitar tab we can call it B3, and in Western notation we call it D.
So this is our first note: D / B3 / Sa.
Whenever we play this, we should hold the D major chord shape. The benefit is that if your finger accidentally touches a wrong string, it will still not sound bad. It will still sound musical because that note will belong to the chord.
So this is B3.
Now the second note is E, which is played as the open 1st string (E0). For this, when we were playing Sa, we used the D major chord. But when we play Re, we do not have to stay in D major. We can use either E minor or A major, because both of these give us open E.
A major is an easy chord shape, and E minor is the common two-finger chord everyone knows.
So we played Sa.
Now for Re, we played E open while holding the A major chord shape.
For Ga, we again hold D major, and the note is E string, 2nd fret (E2). So the first note is D, the second is E, and the next is F#.
So E2 gives us F#, which we call Ga.
Now the next note is Ma, which is G, played on E string, 3rd fret (E3). We can play this with the help of the G major chord.
So our first four notes become:
Sa Re Ga Ma = D E F# G
Now the note Pa is on E string, 5th fret (E5). To play this, we can also use a D major shape. It will sound like this.
This shape is actually movable. This is an A major chord. If we shift it up, it becomes A# / Bb, then B major, then C, then C#, and then this becomes D.
So by holding this D major shape, we play E5, which gives us A, meaning Pa.
After this comes Dha. Dha means B, which is on E string, 7th fret (E7). Here we need to make a barre with the index finger.
So this becomes Dha.
Then for Ni, we play 1st string, 9th fret, and we do not remove the barre. We keep it as it is.
Then after Ni, to play the higher Sa, we use E string, 10th fret, with the pinky, while keeping the barre.
In this barre, one useful point is that if we want, we can take only a half barre on the bottom three strings, because the other two strings already support D major. So a half barre is also possible.
So from Dha Ni Sa, the notes are:
B, C#, D
Let us review once more:
Sa Re Ga Ma Pa Dha Ni Sa = D E F# G A B C# D
These are the notes of the scale.
But we do not want to play this scale plainly. We want to play it with a bass note, otherwise what is the meaning of fingerstyle guitar?