What do guitar scales mean? What do the tonics mean? Where do you start playing them? How can scales be used for soloing? How is it possible to start any scale on any fret? Does it matter which fingers you use to play the notes?
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Forget the guitar for a minute.
Scales in music are just sequences of notes related to each other. You can have the major scale, which is just a sequence of Tones and Semitones (a semitone is one note to the very next one, and a tone is one note to the next-bar-one – think moving one or two frets on a guitar or along one or two keys on the piano which can be black or white). The major scale is 8 notes (so 7 steps) and goes up like TTSTTTS. It doesn’t matter which note you start on, it’s still a major scale. But, it’s basically named after the note you start (and end) on. So, C major starts on C, and goes up D,E,F,G,A,B,C. You also get different versions of minor scales. Major and minor scales are the normal “happy” and “sad” sounding scales. Then you get the blues scale, used a lot in…blues music. And jazz in general.
Musical harmony (at least in the western European tradition and ones which derive from it) is built around keys. The key is basically just the notes of the scale, but you don’t need to play them in order. When you improvise, you tend to want to stay in the same key as the rest of the music, or else it will clash. If you stray outside the key, it tends to be in specific ways to other keys that are related to the main one. One of the easiest ways to do this is to just walk up and down the notes of the scale. A fancier way would be to go up every second note of the scale. Better still, you could walk up the odd-numbered notes and back down the even-numbered ones.
It’s a bit like learning a language. Over time, we build up an understanding of the rules of the language, and develop a collection of phrases we like to use. We string these together to make sentences. Occasionally, we break some of these rules, in the form of a joke or for emphasis. Similarly, musicians will build up phrases based on scales, and will string these together. If they notice something happening that’s similar to something else, they might break the rule in a specific way that forms a musical joke.
To answer some of the specific questions:
The tonic is just a word meaning “the first note of the scale.” Rather than having to think in a specific key, musicians will often think of the relationship between notes within a key. The first note in the major scale is the tonic. The next is the supertonic, then the mediant, then the subdominant, dominant, submediant, leading note, then back to the tonic.
It doesn’t matter which fret you start on, taking the above pattern of steps will still be a major scale. But changing the fret changes from D-major to D#- or E-major.
It doesn’t matter which fingers you use, it’s still the same scale. *But* it makes sense to learn the pattern with a specific set of fingers so that you don’t need to think too hard about it. You get to a point where it becomes muscle memory.
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