Guitar Scales Lesson

Learning Guitar Scales Helps You Memorize the Layout Of The Fretboard
When you spend some time studying scales, you concentrate a lot on remembering the notes what comes next. One benefit of this is that you also have just learned the position of every note to be found on the fretboard. Pretty useful!

Knowing Guitar Scales Will Help You With Learning Guitar Chords
Guitar chords are made out of guitar scales so once you know scales you will have a far greater understanding chords and how they can fit together.

Playing Guitar Scales Is A Great Exercise For The Fingers
Remember the first time you started playing the guitar? It hurt! Now you can play the same old chords without effort but knowing and playing scales gives your fingers a great workout and the gained strength and flexibility really shows in your playing after a short time.

Playing Guitar Scales Helps You To Play Faster and Cleaner
With regular practice of guitar scales you will be able to increase the speed of playing to astounding levels without effort. How often have you heard someone try top play a fast piece of music and fail miserably? Scale playing gives you fluidity and speed, a magical combination.

Scale playing Helps Your Right Hand Too
Right hand technique really is important if you are to progress to more difficult pieces. Playing scales is a perfect exercise to concentrate on alternate picking/fingering of the strings

Practicing Guitar Scales Really Helps With Pitch Recognition

Every time you practice a guitar scale, the individual notes and the note combinations get forced into your brain. If you practice enough scales, whether you want to or not, you will learn the pitches and be able to recognise them easily.

Below are some scales to get started with. They all start with the note, C with your finger on the 8th fret of the 6th string.

There are plenty more to learn and lots of different ways to play them up and down the fretboard but to begin with try these. You can of course move the same pattern to a different starting note. Same pattern - different scale.

C Major Scale

C Minor Scale

C Major Pentatonic Scale

C Minor Pentatonic Scale

C Blues Scale

A good knowledge of scales and the ability to play them all over the entire fretboard In a fluid, musical and effortless way really is one "trick" of all the famous guitarists. The advantages to understanding the fretboard to this level are enormous.

It is the ability to see all the scales over the fretboard without having to think that really marks a player as a true musician rather that someone who can just play a bit of guitar.

If you think about your guitar playing friends, how many of them totally dominate scales? How many can solo musically, fluidly, all over the fretboard and still make it look as if they aren't even trying? Probably not too many.

Learning scales really helped me with my flamenco guitar playing. It is because of his extraordinary knowledge of scales that allowed the genius, Paco de Lucia, change styles efortlessly from playing flamenco to performing jazz with the other wonderful guitarists Al di Meola and John McLaughlin.

If you want to Start Guitar then all it takes is some daily practice. A short period every day is worth much more than several hours one day a week. Just keep at it and you'll be surprised how quickly you will start to learn.