Posts tagged: guitar scale fingerings

May 10, 2011

7 Reasons Why You Should Learn and Master Guitar Scales

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Whether you’re just getting started on guitar or have been playing for years, if you are like most people, your biggest problem on guitar is getting enough time to practice.

With your limited time you want to get as much enjoyment as you can out of your guitar practice sessions.  And of course, you want to improve your guitar playing as quickly as possible.

But let’s face it.  With limited time it’s not so easy.

You’ve heard that you should learn to play guitar scales, but let’s be honest…you would rather play your favourite guitar songs instead of playing boring old guitar scales.

So is it really worth investing some of your limited practice time into learning and mastering guitar scales?

Let me start by asking you this: “Why did you decide to learn to play guitar?”

Now I don’t have to be a mind reader to answer this. Pretty much everyone that decides to learn to play guitar does it because they want to play their favourite songs.  In my 20+ years of teaching I have yet to meet anyone that wanted to learn to play the guitar to only play scales and chords.

So if your main reason for learning to play guitar is to learn songs, then you’ll be interested in anything that makes it easier to learn songs and play them better.  And if you could learn songs faster that would be the icing on the cake.

Now here are 7 compelling reasons why you will probably want to start investing a bit of time into learning and mastering guitar scales…

1. When you play guitar songs, the riffs and licks actually come from scales.

That’s right.

When you play those single note lines in a song they are really just rearranged notes from guitar scales.  So if you already know how to play the scales that are used in the riffs, you will learn those parts of the song much faster.

2. When you know how to play the most common guitar scales, you will learn to play guitar solos faster.

A guitar solo is simply a guitar melody that is created from one or more guitar scales.  If you already know how to play the scales, all you have to do is learn the order that the notes are used.  This makes it much easier to learn guitar solos.  When you know the scales you already know half of the guitar solo!  You just need to learn the order that the notes are used in song.

3. Would you love to be able to pick up the guitar and jam with some friends?

Just imagine being able to create your own guitar solos and make it look easy.

How do you do it?

Guitar solos are built from scales.  If you know your scales and which chords go best with them, you can create cool guitar solos.

4. When you practice guitar scales you will improve your guitar technique.

There are many different ways to practice guitar scales─some more effective than others.  Generally though, the more varied your practice approach to scales, the better your technique will become.  And of course, as your technique improves you will begin to learn guitar songs faster and faster.

5. Learning guitar scales improves your overall understanding of music.

This is a biggie!  The more you learn about music, the faster you will learn new things in music.  So as you learn more about music you will be able to learn songs faster.  Also, as you learn more about music, you’ll have more tools to use for writing your own songs.  So you’ll find writing songs will be easier too.

6. As you learn guitar scales, you will learn arpeggios faster.

When you learn and master guitar scales, you will “see” arpeggio shapes within scale forms.  An arpeggio is simply the notes of a chord played one-by-one.  Often these notes are played in quick succession with sweep picking.  Arpeggios are used in guitar riffs and guitar solos.

7. When you master guitar scales, you will see chord shapes within scale fingerings.

This will make is easier to create guitar solos.  You will be able to see the actual chords that you can use the scale over.  Here is an example:

Below you will see an A minor chord.

Now here is an A minor scale.

Notice how the notes in the A minor chord are found in the A minor scale fingering.  This means you can use the A minor scale to create a guitar solo over top of the A minor chord.

The black notes in the above A minor scale form show the notes in an A minor barre chord.

Now I could go on.  There are actually many more reasons why it’s worth investing some of your practice time into guitar scales, but I won’t get into that here.

Even with these 7 great reasons to learn guitar scales, most guitar players still find learning scales to be about as exciting as watching the grass grow.

The main reason for this is that most guitarists learn scales by rote─they practice scales forwards and backwards over and over and over again.

Learning guitar scales this way is as hard as trying to drain a swimming pool with a soda straw!  You can do it, but who wants to take that long?

There is a better way to learn and master guitar scales.

You’ll learn how to do that in The World of Scales: A Compendium of Scales for the Modern Guitar Player.

In the World of Scales you will discover the most effective ways to quickly learn, master and understand guitar scales.  You’ll also learn some really fun ways to practice and apply guitar scales.   And of course, as you improve your scale mastery, you will learn songs faster and faster.  You can learn more about this proven method here: How to Learn and Master Guitar Scales.

February 22, 2010

Guitar Scales: What’s the Best Way to Play Guitar Scales?

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So What is the Best Guitar Scale Fingering System?
It all depends on whom you ask.

Most guitar players tend to favour the first guitar scale fingering system they learned.  After all, it’s the way they have always played guitar scales, so it must therefore be the best, right?

The guitar scale fingering system that I use and recommend is the Berklee fingerings.  These are the guitar scale fingerings that I use for playing, teaching and in my books.

Most college and university level music programs use these guitar scale fingerings as well.  But not all do.  So again, as I mentioned in “Guitar Scales: What’s Wrong with Guitar Scale Fingerings”, each system has its own pros and cons.

The premise behind the Berklee guitar scale fingerings is very simple:  there is a guitar scale fingering built off of each note in the scale.

Since the major scale has seven notes in it, there are seven guitar scale fingerings for it.  There is a separate fingering starting on each note of the scale.

The first advantage of this system is that it keeps things really simple.  Seven note guitar scales have seven fingerings—one starting on each note.  Six note scales have six fingerings.  Five note guitar scales have five scale fingering patterns, etc.

The other great thing about the Berklee system is that it takes into consideration the bio-mechanics of your hand.  It’s set up so there are no position shifts within each guitar scale fingering.  This makes the Berklee system a really good system for improvisation, arpeggios, sight-reading, etc.

Before we take a look at some guitar scale fingerings, we need to take a look at how to read scale diagrams.

This will be the topic of my next post.  See you soon!

February 20, 2010

Guitar Scales: What’s Wrong with Guitar Scale Fingerings

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Has this Ever Happened to You?

You’re jamming with a friend and he or she plays a guitar scale that you know fairly well. The strange thing is you notice that your buddy uses a completely different guitar scale fingering than you were taught.

Or, what about this?

You look up a scale fingering in a few guitar scale books and see that each book shows different ways to play the same scale.

What gives?  Who’s right?

How Do You Know Which Guitar Scale Fingerings are Correct?

The guitar is an interesting beast.

Just like the piano, it has a long and diverse history. However, over the years piano technique has become pretty much standardized.

This means that most pianists will play a C major scale the exact same way.  On the guitar however as you’ve probably already discovered, it’s very different.  If you ask five guitarists to play the C major scale you’ll probably be amazed and perhaps even shocked at what you get.

On the piano as you move to the left, the notes get lower in pitch.  Move to the right and the notes get higher.

On the guitar you can move across the strings to get higher or lower pitched notes.  Or, you can move up or down the fretboard to produce higher or lower pitched notes.

Something else to consider is the presence of unisons.  A unison is simply two notes of identical pitch and letter-names.  The note C on the first fret of the second string can also be played on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth strings.  You can play this C on the first fret of the second string, on the fifth fret of the third string, on the tenth fret of the fourth string, on the fifteenth fret of the fifth string, or on the twentieth fret of the sixth string.  On the piano this note can only be played on one key.  So on the guitar the million dollar question is: “which C should you use in that scale?”

Don’t Worry

By now you’re starting to understand a little bit about what we are dealing with here.  The good news is you don’t really have to worry about any of this.

Over time different systems have evolved for playing guitar scales.

So Many Different Guitar Scale Approaches…So Little Time

What you need to know is that there are many different but overlapping approaches to guitar scale fingerings.  The confusion lies in the fact that guitar technique and guitar scale fingerings are not really standardized.

Classical guitarists tend to use an older system for playing guitar scales, while contemporary guitarists will use newer systems that are based around five or seven fingerings.

All of the systems for guitar scale fingerings work.  Each has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages.  For every great guitar player you find that uses one guitar scale fingering system, you can find another great guitarist that uses a different system.

This explains why you can find the major scale shown many different ways in guitar scale books.  One book might be based on one system while another guitar scale book might use a different guitar scale fingering system.

So What is the Best Guitar Scale Fingering System?

This I’ll answer in part 2 of this post…