C Major Scale on 4-String Bass

Play the C Major scale on 4-String Bass with fretboard diagrams that map the pattern across the neck. The Major scale has 7 notes per octave and belongs to the common family.

All 4 of 4-String Bass's open strings fall inside C Major — E (the 3rd), A (the 6th), D (the 2nd), G (the 5th) — though C itself has to be stopped. Open, the strings cover E1 to G2.

It is also known as the Ionian scale.

Bright, resolved, and stable. The foundation of Western tonal music and the most common mode in pop, classical, folk, and jazz.

Heard in: Pop, classical, country, folk, gospel — the default major tonality of Western music.

4-String Bass is tuned E–A–D–G, with 15 frets to work with.

Each position shows the scale notes and their intervals from the root so you can connect the shape to its sound, hear it with audio playback, and practice it in any register. Movable patterns let you transpose the same fingering to other keys once it is learned.

Once a position is under your fingers, link the C Major scale to the chords it harmonizes and to progressions in the key of C to start improvising and writing with it. Working a scale alongside its chords is the fastest way to make it stick and to hear how it colors a progression.