The problem with learning scale patterns from paper and just memorizing them as such is that it makes your musical abilities purely physical. You can play through the scale, but only in that pattern, which means that to play it across the entire fretboard you need to learn many different patterns and string them all together. But what happens if you want to play a scale up one or two strings? Suppose you need to continue a scale up just the high E string, what do you do then?

You can try to just play the top part of all the patterns that you know, and this may work with some practice, but you can see that you are already having to stretch the rote memorization method to its limits. Now what happens when you need to change one note of the scale? Say someone asks you to lower the third of the scale. If you only know it as a huge grid of patterns you will be lost.

This type of inflexible methodology will only construct barriers in your guitar playing. You will always get to a point where the patterns do not allow you to truly be musical, or to truly improvise, since all you are doing is just moving your fingers in a given pattern. So what is the alternative?

Learning scales by ear can allow you the freedom to take full advantage of the entire guitar fretboard and manipulate groups of notes with ease and without constraint. If you are playing a major scale based on its sound and not a pattern, there are no situations in which your ability will be limited or destroyed. Now, how do you develop this skill?

The simple answer is to start doing it. Try to forget about any kind of patterns that you have already memorized; just get them out of your head. Then try playing a major scale up and down one string. Do it with just your ear as a guide and let your fingers naturally feel out the right notes. You might not even want to look at the guitar at all.

Once you can play the scale up and down one string starting from whatever root note, try it between each different set of two strings, then three, and so on. Then do this for other scales. Start out by getting the sound of them in your head, which you might want to do by singing them, and then start playing them in these limited scenarios. Play the different scales in a limited number of frets as well as on a limited number of strings, or maybe combinations of the two.

As you are doing this, you will feel your ears and fingers gain coordination and your intuitive feel for the instrument increase dramatically. Patterns will also start to emerge naturally for all of the different intervals and scales, and this is fine. Let the patterns come to you as they do, but remember always to follow your ear and these patterns will act as mere side effects instead of your main guide.

The benefits to learning guitar scales in this manner are overwhelming compared to the traditional methods. Although students who learn to skim over patterns quickly may sound more advanced at first, over time the ones playing with their ears will display better musical sense and creativity that others will lack. While the rote-memorizationalists get tried of racing through finger patterns after a few years, the ones playing by ear will constantly be exploring their instrument to its fullest and always discovering new ideas about music.

Using a pick has always seemed to be more popular because it is associated with more popular styles of music. Rock, pop, funk, and many of the other mainstream styles focus on strumming and other techniques, which make sense to be done with a pick. At the same time, classical and sometimes jazz are examples of the kinds of styles more dominated by finger picking.

While a pick can be a great device for certain motions like strumming, finger picking has many more available motions that can produce all sorts of sounds and rhythms either impossible or very difficult to perform with a pick. One of the most obvious advantages is being able to pluck multiple notes at the exact same time. This can be partially replicated with a pick, but the end result is much different, and quick rhythmic hits on chords can only be done with precision by using the fingers.

There is also a much greater ability to do different kinds of arpeggios with fingerstyle playing. Not only can you perform complex patterns of notes from a chord with relative ease, but you can do very fast trills of all of the notes to produce a nice constant harmony sound, something impossible with a pick.

The advantages of finger picking when playing rhythm parts on guitar are pretty obvious, and we might note that strumming can still be done in a variety of ways just using your fingers without a pick., but even beyond this, there are several advantages for finger picking single note lines as well.
One of the best is that you can turn single lines into polyphony of any time with much greater ease, precision, and possibility. Fingerstyle allows you to integrate chords, single note lines, and everything in between with more ability and economy. This fact can allow you to really open up the guitar to polyphonic playing and other concepts that take advantage of its nature and separate it from other instruments.

Single notes can also be played with tremolo in a much better fashion when finger picked, and this will even leave your thumb open to play addition notes along with it, as many classical guitarists demonstrate. These types of techniques can only happen when using the fingers, and at the same time, there are not really any techniques that the pick can do which the fingers cannot in some fashion.

If you have never thought about or explored finger picking on the guitar, start trying it out. It doesn’t mean you should abandon playing with a pick completely. It is still an important part of playing many styles, but finger picking is important as well, and will help you open up brand new possibilities in your playing. Whenever you get the chance to expand your ability on an instrument, you should take it.

This is an informative video on inside and outside picking on the guitar. As the video explains, these are the logical extensions of alternate picking when you have to pick between gaps of strings, and they will help you keep smooth alternate picking technique no matter what kind of jump you have to do between strings. It is important to have these methods under control to really take advantage of what can be done with a pick and to ensure that you are able to keep really steady time. A good picking technique lies at the base of everything else so it is important to spend the time to get it right.

Practice these techniques slowly at first and work your way up to ensure that you are developing them in the right fashion. Once you have them down by themselves, work on putting them together in natural situations, such as in chord arpeggios or scales. With these mastered, your alternate picking abilities should be able to handle any situation you come across on the guitar, all while maintaining a constant and steady stream of notes.

The guitar is an instrument that allows for many different possibilities in approach. This is true of chords, scales, and even single notes. On the fretboard, there can be many different positions for the same exact note. Not just the same note, but the same exact pitch. Not many other instruments operate like this, and it creates an almost infinite amount of paths to the same tonal results, especially for things like scales.

Playing the guitar by memorizing a few patterns and only being able to play them one way ignores much of the guitar’s power of flexibility. To accomplish complex improvisation and voice leading you need to be able to get to other notes on the guitar in the most efficient manner, and this means knowing the different paths to them.

So how do you develop this more intuitive and flexible understanding of the fretboard? The best way is to forget about learning patterns and work on learning scales and chords by intervals and sound. Learning the intervals on a guitar will help you know the spatial relationships between notes on the fretboard, and if you combine this with a good ear for the scales and chords you will be able to get around the instrument without being constricted to patterns.

The best way to get your fingers capable of handling the possibilities of the guitar is to learn new chord and scale fingerings in as many ways as possible. Try to learn the chords using whatever finger combinations you can, so that there is always a way to play the chord in whatever hand position you happen to be in. This will increase your overall finger abilities as well, so it is a good exercise in general.

Improvising pieces from scratch in another great exercise to perform that will help you with finger coordination, hearing melodic and harmonic movements, and getting a feel for intervals outside of scale patterns as well. These types of practices will give you a much more intuitive and musical feel for the guitar that will allow you to take advantage of all of the flexibility offered by the instrument.

You can overcome this ineffective method of learning scales by learning them intuitively. This means to learn them as a sound and feel rather than a specific pattern. At its best, this method will allow you to play any scale you are familiar with on any part of the guitar, however limited. You will also be able to change some of the sounds around to produce different results with greater ease. This technique will also allow you to gain a good feel for how to produce certain sounds, and a feel for when certain intervals should be used. Overall, it can help you develop the ability to play exactly what you hear in your mind.

Since the guitar is an instrument that provides many possibilities for playing the same note or groups of notes, a flexible approach makes sense. Instead of learning a few scale patterns for a certain scale, work on getting the sound of a scale in your head, by playing it a few times and even singing it. Then try to play it without falling into any patterns. Play it on single strings, then between only two strings. Then only in a certain hand position. Go through as many possibilities as possible and then start jumping between different intervals in the scale.

The best way to do this is to improvise melodies in whatever limited areas of the fretboard you can think of. What this does is builds up a connection between your ear and your fingers that will let you achieve whatever sound you want to hear on the guitar. After practicing it for a long time, you should be able to play a scale in any position in an unlimited amount of ways, and you should be able to do it without even looking at the guitar at all.

Once you have achieved this, do it with all sorts of different scales, and you will really see that you are gaining an intuitive feel for producing the right intervals and scales on the guitar. This will free you from knowing scales as patterns only and allow you to play much more freely all over the instrument. You general knowledge and feel for the guitar will also greatly increase.

If you have only learned guitar scales as patterns up until this point, consider taking a more intuitive approach to really take advantage of the freedom the guitar allows.