Many people think of scales as a symbol of how tedious it is to learn music. You go up and down the scale, making life unpleasant for yourself and whoever is in earshot. Like all painful processes, learning guitar scales has great rewards for those who choose to brave the boredom.
This free guitar lesson lets a little light on the subject of scales. Guitar players are always looking for ways to make their solo playing sound more interesting. Our audiences only keep coming back to our gigs if they feel that we have more to give them, so we need to be ahead of their expectations.
One of the ways we can do this is to add another scale or mode to our repertoire. Once we have a collection of techniques we can use when we do our solos, scales gives us more material that we can make our own with the way we play our hammer-ons, string skipping, note bending and our other lead guitar tricks.
A basic plan for learning scales is to be master of the minor pentatonic in its five shapes. This gives you two octaves you can use as your playground for your improvisation. It will take some time to really be able to move around the minor pentatonic scale without thinking too much, and after that, you have the rest of your life to acquire more scales, and then move onto some of the modes.
We all have our moments where we find a tune playing in our heads. With knowledge of at least one scale in all keys you can explore the melody using your scale patterns. Once you feel that your playing is beginning to sound predictable you can visit some of the free guitar lesson websites and learn some more licks or start work on say, the locrian mode.
When you are learning a new scale or mode, repetition is your friend. Play the scale up, then play it down with alternate picking. Over and over again. Start with a relaxed left hand, make sure only the tips of your fingers are pressing on the strings to get a clear sound. Have your fingers in position over the frets you are playing at, and assign one fret to a finger.
During the day, if you have the time you will probably be picking up your guitar and playing whatever you have been working on lately. Add a scale to this routine. So you are only playing for a few minutes each time but you might find that you are picking up the guitar ten, twenty or fifty times a day!
Also remember that you don't have to start at the root note of the scale all the time. Experiment with playing the notes in a different order.
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