Guitar Scales
Why Guitar Scales?
Scales are a fundamental part of music and it is very important to learn them. Learning guitar scales will help you in various ways, including but not limited to:
- Improving Finger Dexterity & Strength - Playing scales regularly will help increase your finger dexterity, i.e. faster and more accurate fingering, and also finger strength. This in turn will help you become a better guitarist.
- Ear Training - By learning scales you will start to memorize various patterns of notes and you will start to be able to recognize what scales are being used.
- Ability to Improvise & Write Music - With your increased understanding of guitar scales you will start to be able to improvise solos, as well as write your own music.
Practicing Scales
As mentioned previously guitar scales should be practiced as often as possible. It would be ideal to play scales as a warmup before you start playing properly. If you want to do some speed training you could use a metronome. Set it to a slow tempo to begin with and play the scale along to it. Once you have mastered it at that tempo you can start to increase the tempo a little bit at a time, for example by 5bpm. This systematic approach will ensure that you don't pick up any bad habits.
Free Guitar Scales
Shown below are various guitar scales - click on them to find the guitar scale you want. Please note that the red notes represent the root note of the scale.
Major
The major scale is made up of seven distinct notes, plus an eighth which duplicates the first an octave higher, and is classified as a diatonic scale. |
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Major Pentatonic
This is one of the most common anhemitonic pentatonic scales, which can be constructed in a number of different ways. |
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Minor
A minor scale in musical theory is a diatonic scale whose third scale degree is an interval of a minor third above the tonic. |
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Minor Pentatonic
The minor pentatonic scale is derived from the major pentatonic scale, and uses scale tones 1, 3, 4, 5, and 7 of the natural minor scale. |
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Harmonic Minor
The harmonic minor scale is the same as the natural minor but with a chromatically raised seventh degree. |
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Melodic Minor
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Blues
The scale that is most commonly referred to as "the blues scale" is derived from the minor pentatonic scale |
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