Lead Guitar Scales: Become A Master Soloist By Learning These
If you want to hear someone who knows their scales…. Check out Paul Gilbert. You will never be the same after you hear him play scales. While learning lead guitar scales can be boring, it is absolutely important for you to master them. Once you have, you can easily learn to play any lead guitar part, from any musical genre.
There are boatloads of ways to learn scales. But if you want to make things easy on yourself, just lock into the to key scales…. the Pentatonic and the Major scales. If you think about it, the Pentatonic scale is one of the key lead guitar scales. Learn the Minor and Major Pentatonics and you can cover just about every playing situation that exists. If you learn the Major and Minor versions of this. You’ve got 90% of the situations covered. Technically, the Pentatonic Scale is a scale thats made up of a simple five notes.
You can begin learning the minor pentatonic scale on a single string of the guitar. Pick a fret on that string and play the note. Now move up three frets and play the note that you land on. Move up two frets, play; move up another two frets and play. Move up another three frets and play. Finally, move up another two frets and play; this note should be the octave of the first note played.
Done? Now you can pat yourself on the back! You can use this scale to play anywhere on the neck of your guitar. Its the Minor Pentatonic. So keep practicing this one. One other thing…this pattern can be used to play the major pentatonic scale. Just begin on the second note of the pattern to get started. That’s it. And when you compare the major scale vs the pentatonic scale, the major uses all seven notes. The pentatonic uses just five notes. Ok, and something else I forgot to mention.. when you are playing major scales, keep your fretting fingers in the right position.
One technique for learning major scales is to play three notes per string; doing so will also increase the speed of your playing once you’ve mastered it. Begin with the sixth string, use the first, third and fourth fingers for fretting and position them separated by one fret. Strum downwards, then upwards and then downwards again. Repeat with the fifth string but play up, then down and then up again.
When moving to the fourth string, move your first finger one fret down, and keep the other fingers in the same position; keep the same position for the third string, and on the second string, move again with the first finger, moving one fret down, the third finger two frets down, and the fourth finger one fret below that. Play and maintain the exact same position on the last string. Now just continue your alternate picking patterns.
Want to find out more about Lead Guitar Scales, then visit Soudai Kunai’s site on how to learn lead guitar lessons.
