Monday, August 23, 2010

Lead Guitar Scales: These Can Help You Become A Master

By Soudai Kunai

If you want to hear someone who knows their scales.... Check out Paul Gilbert. You will never be the same after you hear him play scales. While learning lead guitar scales can be boring, it is absolutely important for you to master them. Once you have, you can easily learn to play any lead guitar part, from any musical genre.

There are boatloads of ways to learn scales. But if you want to make things easy on yourself, just lock into the to key scales.... the Pentatonic and the Major scales. If you think about it, the Pentatonic scale is one of the key lead guitar scales. Learn the Minor and Major Pentatonics and you can cover just about every playing situation that exists. If you learn the Major and Minor versions of this. You've got 90% of the situations covered. Technically, the Pentatonic Scale is a scale thats made up of a simple five notes.

To get started with the Minor Pentatonic, pick a string on your guitar. Any string. On that string, choose a fret, and play the note. Next, move your finger up three frets. Play that note. Doing good! Next, move your finger up two frets. Play the note. And now move up two more frets. Play that note. Next, move your finger up three more frets. Play that note. Ok, one more....move up two frets. Play this note. When you play it.. it should sound about the same as the first note you played. This is the octave of that very first note.

Done? Now you can pat yourself on the back! You can use this scale to play anywhere on the neck of your guitar. Its the Minor Pentatonic. So keep practicing this one. One other thing...this pattern can be used to play the major pentatonic scale. Just begin on the second note of the pattern to get started. That's it. And when you compare the major scale vs the pentatonic scale, the major uses all seven notes. The pentatonic uses just five notes. Ok, and something else I forgot to mention.. when you are playing major scales, keep your fretting fingers in the right position.

One idea for learning major scales is to play just three notes per string; and by doing this, you'll increase the speed of your playing.... once you've mastered it. Lets begin with the sixth string. Now just use your first, third and fourth fingers for fretting and position them separated by one fret. Strum them downwards, then upwards and then down again. Repeat with the fifth string, but in the up direction. Now go down and up again.

Alright, now when you move to the fourth string, move your first finger just one fret down, and keep your other fingers in the same position; keeping in the same position for the third string, and on the second string, move with the first finger, moving one fret down, and with the third finger two frets down, and with the fourth finger, just one fret below that. Now that you've moved, play and keep the exact same position on that last string. Make sure that throughout, you continue your alternate picking patterns.

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