Where to Start Your Guitar Scale Journey
(Video Guitar Lesson 5 of 5)
So now you understand the basics of playing guitar scales. You know how to read the scale charts that you might see in different books, or online guitar lessons. And you believe me that practicing some scales on the guitar would be a good idea 🙂 So where do you start.
Well a good place to start is with the basic major scale form that was used for the examples of the horizontal and vertical scale charts in this lesson. Memorize that scale form. Practice it with a metronome. Keeping a steady time is very important when practicing scales on the guitar. Practice at a speed where you can play every note evenly, and then start increasing the speed.
At first, picking all down is fine as you are getting comfortable with where the notes are. After that you will want to start to practice picking both down and up in the ways indicated below.
1. Pick 2 times on every note. Down the first time, and up the 2nd time. You could think of the rhythms as either 8th notes or 16th notes.
2. Pick 1 time on every note, but alternate down and up picking for each note. At first you may really need to concentrate on keeping a strict alternation between down and up picks.
More Scales to Learn
Now you don’t want to go crazy. Until you have some real practical ways to actually use scales in your guitar playing, you don’t need to go memorizing a ton of scale forms. Once you are learning how to improvise, or write your own music…then it makes more sense to expand the number of scale forms that you know and practice.
So besides the basic major scale form that we started with, I would suggest learning these 4 other basic guitar scale forms.
Minor Pentatonic – This is used for all kinds of lead guitar solos.
Blues – Really only adding a note to the minor pentatonic scale.
Minor – Also known as a Natural Minor scale.
Major Pentatonic – Another very common form for lead guitar playing.
There are actually some new video guitar lessons coming on all of the scale forms I am suggesting here, so check back and you will find links to them. But to tie you over, below is a page in the old part of Cyberfret.com were you will find these scale forms. Sorry, those are some old videos…so in all honesty I would just skip them and look at the scale charts. That lesson will be replaced soon with a new one, but at least it will get you started.
Guitar Lesson Navigation
<<< Page 4, The Root of a Guitar Scale
<<< Page 3, Reading Vertical Guitar Scale Charts
<<< Page 2, Intro to Guitar Scales
<<< Page 1, Intro to Guitar Scales
