Learning Guitar Scales By Ear

The normal routine for guitar players and teachers is to learn scales by memorizing scale patterns from a sheet of paper until you can fly through them as fast as possible. While this method may be quick and easy, it is not musical and skips all the hard work that is required to develop the ear and the fingers for uninhibited exploration of the instrument. This article is going to dispel the common practices of rote learning in guitar playing and explore a more beneficial manner of internalizing guitar scales.

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.

March 06 2010 | Guitar Scale Charts

Learning Guitar Scales Intuitively

Learning guitar scales intuitively is something that is not talked about a lot be guitar teachers or players, but it may be one of the most beneficial things to do on the instrument. Most of the time, guitar scales are approached by memorizing patterns all over the fretboard. The problem with this method is that it is very rigid. If you tell someone who has the patterns memorized to change on of the notes in the scale to a sharp or flat, they wont know what to do. Likewise, if you tell them to play the scale on only one or two strings, they will be similarly lost.

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.

February 07 2010 | Guitar Scale Charts

Guitar Scales Philosophy

There is a better philosophy to guitar scales than what most guitar teachers will say. The usual route of learning them is to memorize them in shapes on the fretboard. The problem with this approach is that for every new scale you have to learn multiple patterns up and down the fretboard to really be able to play the scale anywhere. At the same time, you usually don’t know what notes you are actually playing with this philosophy, it is all just a visual shape to you.

A better approach is to build scales by interval. If you can understand each interval and put them together one at a time to create whatever scale you want, you have a much more flexible and powerful understanding of the guitar. This method will require you to play and digest things slowly at first, but after a while, all of the intervals become familiar to you, and you can start creating whatever types of guitar scales that you want. It also works the same way for chords and anything else that you play.

Intervals are often ignored by guitar players and teachers. People usually go straight to playing some basic chords and scales, but this is premature if you don’t understand the intervals that make up those chords and scales. Spend some time with the intervals first philosophy and see how it can improve your knowledge of the instrument and music in general. For anyone interested in philosophy in general, there are some great philosophy t shirts at this site by the way.

November 18 2009 | Guitar Scale Charts

Guitar Scales Theory Taught In Private Music Lessons

Many guitar instructors will teach guitar scales by just telling the student to memorize a pattern from a chart. This may not be the best path to take in private music lessons. While this is fine to get them started and playing quickly, at some point, they are going to need to learn the theory that enables them to break down the scales into smaller units so they can understand what is going on.

If you can only understand a guitar scale as a pattern on the fretboard you will not know how to change this pattern around to get added desired sounds, and this will limit your playing as your creative instinct advances. It is important to learn interval theory in your private music lessons so that you can work with groups of notes such as chords and scales and be able to make them into whatever you want.

Music lessons should focus on understanding music at a basic level before students progress too far, otherwise they just end up relearning material and doing damage to their development. The guitar scales that some people know as simple patterns on the instrument are much more involved, and to understand them, you need to understand the intervals that make them sound the way they do. Once you have this down, you can manipulate the intervals in the scales to form whatever sounds you want. This is the ultimate goal of music, to be able to create what you hear in your mind.

If you are taking private music lessons, make sure you are taught how to really understand the guitar fretboard with intervals and not just shapes alone.

October 30 2009 | Guitar Scale Charts

Blue Scale Guitar Chart

The blues scale is an important guitar scale to learn for playing the blues, rock, and jazz. This free printable blues scale guitar chart will show you all of the patterns for the blues scale. This scale will look similar to the minor pentatonic guitar scale because it is the same scale with an added note, the flat fifth. This added note gives the blues scale a more interesting sound that works well in a lot of situations.

The different patterns of the blues scale shown on this blues scale guitar chart will allow you to play the scale all over the guitar fretboard. You will also be able to start the scale from any position which can help you apply the blues scale to jazz tunes with frequent chord changes. The blues scale can be a great addition to your guitar scale library and this blues scale guitar chart is the best way to learn it.

August 24 2008 | Guitar Scale Charts