Learn Guitar Scales - How to Best Utilize Your Guitar Scale Practice

Arts & EntertainmentBooks & Music

  • Author James Smith
  • Published May 22, 2010
  • Word count 428

Well, if you were hoping to find some tab to specific guitar scales, you have come to the wrong place. What I'm going to detail here is how to best study guitar scales in a way that may progress your playing the most for your practice time. The key to learn how to play guitar scales is to integrate them into your playing to a degree that you can quite spontaneously improvise phrases based primarily on the notes of the scales you know.

When learning a new scale, this is a good set of steps to follow:

  1. Learn to play the scale ascending and descending, add this to your daily practice routine and steadily build speed with the scale.

  2. Learn a few sequences of the scale and add this to your practice routine too. A sequence is a pattern on the scale. Start by numbering the notes of the scale in ascending order, 1, 2, 3, ... A common sequence might be playing the notes of the scale: 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3,4 5, .... or 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 3, 4, 5, 3, ... These sequences should be played ascending and descending as well.

  3. Discover what chords or chord progressions you can use the scale to improvise over.

  4. Learn some licks primarily based on the scale, and then start forming variations of these licks that are unique. For instance, play around with varying the timing of the notes in the licks and using some other notes on the scale in the lick as well.

  5. Practice licks and varying the licks over backing tracks with the right chords to discover how the scale sounds in the context of a backing.

  6. Move from varying and making licks to quite spontaneously forming phrases using the notes of the scale as your ear for the scale develops.

This is a method I've found effective to move from the point of learning a new scale to being able to integrate this scale into your improvisation.

Aside from this scale practice routine to learn guitar scales, I would suggest 3 basic points to ensure you learn guitar successfully:

  1. Regular practice: If you don't want to put in at least 20 minutes a day, 5 days a week into your instrument, you can't expect solid progress.

  2. Get a competent teacher: Next to regular practice, this could be the best thing you can do to learn to play guitar.

  3. Grab some of the leading online guitar courses, dvds and instructional books to bolster the material your teacher is showing you. These resources can frequently come with a big range of written, audio and video lessons as well as audio backing tracks to start to practice your improvisation with.

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