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Fastest Way To Learn Guitar Scales
By Mike Hayes | July 8, 2010
For the first eighteen months of my guitar playing career the
only scales I knew about were on fish! True story, I didn’t play
scales or even know they existed.
The first year of my guitar playing adventures consisted of
learning to play melodies (tunes) on the guitar, I’m very
thankful for this type of introduction to music as I have never
been asked to play a scale at any gig over the past thirty five
years of professional playing but I have played many requests for
tunes!
I’m mentioning this because there’s an over emphasis of the
importance of scales in guitar instruction; the type of thinking
that’s widely presented is that if you lock yourself in a room
practicing scales 24/7/365 for ten years you will be a ‘guitar-
god’.
Reality check: If you locked yourself in a room for ten years
playing guitar you would:
(a) be very hungry (and tired)
(b) quite crazy
(c) and still not be able to play any songs …
On the positive side you would be able to play lots of scales
(really fast).
A good working knowledge of scales and their musical application
is an important part of a well balanced musician’s education the
trick is not to become totally obsessed with them, scales are
merely your musical alphabet, nothing more, nothing less!
The purpose of this article is to drastically reduce the amount
of time you spend learning scales on the guitar.
Here’s the fastest way to learn scales on the guitar:
Tip 1: Decide which scale you need to learn, this will be
determined by the music YOU want to play; it’s pointless learning
some rare Egyptian scale if you only want to play the blues.
Don’t learn a scale just because it’s in a book or your
teacher/friend suggested it would be good for you to learn.
Remember: Five minutes though is better than five hours of
haphazard practice on guitar.
Tip 2: Learn the key signatures, know how many sharps or flats
are in each key e.g., key of G = 1 sharp (F sharp); key of F = 1
flat (B flat); key of D = 2 sharps (F sharp and C sharp) etc
Tip 3: Learn the name of the notes on the guitar fretboard; this
is the most important thing to do if you want to learn your
scales quickly; initially it will seems like it’s the slowest way
but believe me learning scale patterns and not having a single
clue what you are doing is a one way ticket to nowhere!
I know it’s common for guitar players to learn a pentatonic scale
pattern without:
(a) knowing the names of any of the notes they are playing in the
scale pattern under their fingers
(b) or without even knowing which type of pentatonic scale (major
or minor) they are playing.
Can you see how hopeless this scale pattern learning really is ?
Take your time learn the notes on your guitar, know the key
signatures and decide which scale(s) are relevant to your music
and you will literally save years of wasted practice and musical
frustration.
Topics: Guitar Fretboard, guitar scales | No Comments »
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