« Beginners Guitar Lesson: Chords With Only One Finger | Home | Beginner Guitar Lesson: Easy Guitar Notes »
Beginners Guitar Lesson: Lead Guitar Traps & How To Avoid Them
By Mike Hayes | January 4, 2009
Scales can free your fingers and freeze your brain. Practicing
scales hour after hour can actually harm your progress on the
guitar.
How many lead guitar books have you bought that are absolutely
chock full of scales? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by this
avalanche of information, the fact that there are thousands of
scales that have to be learnt in twelve different keys and played
over the entire fingerboard is enough to scare off all but the
very determined guitarist.
In fact, in many instances when confronted by this seemingly
impossible task of playing lead guitar the unfortunate result is
the player giving up in frustration, I say unfortunate because it
certainly doesn’t have to be that way.
Here’s a few concepts and attitudes about scales that will help
you ‘pin your ears on straight’ and save you countless hours of
frustrating, counterproductive practice.
Fact 1: You don’t have to learn all the scales – now isn’t that a
relief straight away, most guitar instructional material would
have you believe that you would be a second rate guitarist unless
you knew every scale backwards (and forwards).
Nothing could be further from the truth! Playing music has
absolutely nothing to do with learning hundreds of scales and
playing them as fast as you possibly can all over the guitar like
a “bee in a bottle”.
How many scales you need to learn will depend on the style(s) of
music you want to play, but in any case you will only be looking
at a very small number of scales, usually between six and ten
maximum.
You should however, learn your scales thoroughly in each of the
twelve keys.
Fact 2: Scales alone are not music – scales are nothing more than
a musical alphabet. To use this analogy between music scale and
spoken language … it therefore stands to reason that simply
reciting an alphabet (regardless of how fast you could recite
it), would not communicate anything!
Scales can become music when carefully woven into the musical
soundscape by an experienced musician.
The reason why musicians learn different scales is to help them
express themselves better in a variety of musical settings, it
also help make their music more interesting by adding variety to
their music.
The important distinction is to make certain you are learning the
scales that are relevant to your music.
Fact 3: Playing scales fast will not help you improve your ‘ear’.
If you have ever watched any of the thousands of lead guitar
videos where the guitarist plays the scale at warp speed setting
the fretboard alight with his or her facile fingers display you
will know apart from it being very entertaining that
(a) it was a great chance for the guitarist to “show off”,
(b) it didn’t communicate anything … it was just a random
phrase and
(c) you most likely did not learn anything apart from the fact
that you don’t want to hear it again.
When you play a scale fast you only hear the first and last notes
which incidentally happen to be the same note only an octave
apart.
Because you are playing over the rest of the notes in the scale
so fast your ear does not get a chance to listen it how each
individual note sounds in relation to the previous sounds, the
notes simply ‘blur’ together.
Playing meaningful music is about constantly making choices and
reacting to the sounds around you, it has nothing to do with
“showing off” and playing random phrases as fast as possible.
To summarize : Select the relevant scales for your style(s) of
music, learn to play these scales in all the twelve keys, and
learn the art of playing your scales slowly. These tips will
accelerate your lead guitar playing and will help you escape the
dreaded lead guitar traps.
Topics: Beginner Guitar Lesson | No Comments »
Comments
You must be logged in to post a comment.