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Easy Guitar Scales For Country Music

By Mike Hayes | June 17, 2010

If you have just started playing guitar your head is probably
spinning from the avalanche of stuff you seem to have to learn
about playing guitar; the trick is to sift through the
information and only work on the stuff relevant to your style of
playing.

It’s possible to get so tangled up that your guitar playing
actually grinds to a halt, you’ll often find yourself shaking
your head saying “this is impossible”; sure enough your brain
will agree that people just don’t do the ‘impossible’ and very
soon you could find yourself selling that guitar and settling
down to something much easier like brain surgery!

Here’s my tips for overcoming the guitar information maze.

Step 1. Select the style of guitar playing that interests you -
today our focus is on country guitar.

Step 2. Identify what aspect of country guitar playing you want
to work on – I’m going to work on country guitar scales (the easy
ones that sound great!)

Step 3. Use this stuff – pick some songs you want to play and use
these scales in your solo and back up guitar playing.

Now we are getting somewhere; right away you have just lifted a
huge load of unnecessary stuff off your guitar playing shoulders;
you don’t have to worry about heavy metal scales, jazz scales and
oriental scales and tons of other stuff so already we are on our
way!

What scales should we learn?

The best country guitar scales to learn are: major scale; major
pentatonic; minor pentatonic and the blues scale.

The trick is not so much in the scale itself but rather how you
play these scales on the guitar, you see a major scale can be
down right boring if you just play it ascending and descending in
fact it will probably sound more like a classical exercise rather
than a smoking country guitar solo.

Good country guitar playing should always include open strings
wherever possible so I’m going to present a one of the many ways
you can adapt standard musical scales to your country guitar
repertoire of lick and tricks.

Standard C major scale:

C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C

Typical scale pattern:

————————
————————
—————-2–4–5-
——-2–3–5———-
-3–5——————-
————————

Important: notice how all the notes in this scale pattern are
played on closed strings.

Here’s one neat option for country guitar players

———————————
————————–0—–
——————0———-5–
—–0—————-7———
——–7-h-8——————
–8—————————–

Do you notice anything different? Yes, I’ve played the notes in a
different position on the guitar and most importantly I’ve
included a few open strings, this will really let your guitar
playing breathe and give you that great country sound on the
guitar.

Topics: Guitar Chords, guitar scales | No Comments »

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