How To Play Guitar Scales Lesson
If you want to learn how to play lead guitar and create your own solos and improvisations over music you will need to first learn how to play guitar scales, and further to that learn to play them anywhere on the fretboard.
We will start our journey by looking into the four basic guitar scales that you will need to master, they are the major, minor, major pentatonic and minor pentatonic. After looking at each guitar scale you will be given a practice routine and by the end of this guitar lesson you will be ready to kick out the jams with Tom Morello!
As you learn guitar scales and put the theory into practice you should aim to use alternate picking, which is, a down strum for the first note and an up strum for the second and continue to move from down to up as you continue.
I can not emphasize enough the importance of playing to a metronome or an adjustable tempo track, start off with a tempo that is very comfortable for you, one that you can easily play in time to without thinking too much.
Major Scales
Major scales sound great when you use them in short runs, we’re going to look at them first in this guitar lesson. The tonal pattern for the Major Scale is below, you will want to write this down somewhere and study it until it becomes tattooed on your brain. So we have something to work with we will look at the C Major Scale.
C to D : tone
D to E : tone
E to F : semi-tone
F to G : tone
G to A : tone
A to B : tone
B to C : semi-tone
Your C Major Homework can be accessed for free anytime at my website.
Minor Scales
Just like the Major scales the Minor guitar scales use a tonal pattern to work out which notes fit. You can find the relative Minor of a Major scale by identifying the 6th note in the Major Scale. For our C Major Scale this is A, and here is how the Minor scale is constructed:
A to B : tone
B to C : semi-tone
C to D : tone
D to E : tone
E to F : semi-tone
F to G : tone
G to A : semi-tone
The exercise for the A Minor can be freely accessed at InstantGuitarist.com under Learn Guitar Scales.
Major Pentatonic Scale on Guitar
A pentatonic scale is one that is comprised of only 5 notes, and as such these are easy to learn and use when improvising over backing tracks and creating new lead lines. To create a Major Pentatonic scale we take just the first, second, third, fifth and sixth notes from the Major Scale. So looking at our C Major Scale this would work out to be the notes: C, D, E, G and A.
Your C Major Pentatonic Homework:
The Minor Pentatonic Scale
Another scale with just 5 notes and possibly the most widely used scale in lead guitar parts, you will find this everywhere. First find out what key the song is in, if it is in something like C Major we know how to get to A Minor, now we cherry pick the 5 notes using the method for the Major Pentatonic scale and get A, C, D, E, and G.
Now for some real homework, find the track called Layla by Eric Clapton, you will be able to find it on YouTube easily just make sure you look for the acoustic version.
Now, you are going to play the D Minor Pentatonic scale over the solo and the chorus, just fiddle around with different notes and different structures, the solo itself is based around the scale and you can practice playing it in time with the music, here it is here:
Learning lead guitar is something that all guitarists should undertake, Adam Summers provides more information so you can learn how to play guitar as quickly as possible. Check out the extra resources under Lead Guitar so you can learn guitar scales fast.
