By Adam Summers
Making your own solos and lead lines over a backing track or your own music is the holy grail of the lead guitarist. First you will need to learn guitar scales to achieve this goal.
The 4 most commonly used scales are the minor pentatonic, major pentatonic, major and minor scales. We'll start by looking at each of these in this guitar lesson. You will go through a simple exercise for each guitar scale to build your familiarity and speed with each scale, by the end of this lesson you will be ready to jam with Kirk Hammett!
As you learn guitar scales and put the theory into practice you should aim to use alternate picking, which is, a down strum for the first note and an up strum for the second and continue to move from down to up as you continue.
The only other tool I would recommend besides a good pick is a metronome or backing track where you can set the tempo. You will want to practice these guitar scales at very slow tempos to begin with.
The Major Scale
The Major scale is first on the list of guitar scales you are going to learn. Each guitar scale follows a certain pattern, this is what you want to commit to memory. We will be looking at the C Major Scale as our example:
C to D : tone
D to E : tone
E to F : semi-tone
F to G : tone
G to A : tone
A to B : tone
B to C : semi-tone
Your C Major Homework can be accessed for free anytime at my website.
Minor Scales
Just like the Major scales the Minor guitar scales use a tonal pattern to work out which notes fit. You can find the relative Minor of a Major scale by identifying the 6th note in the Major Scale. For our C Major Scale this is A, and here is how the Minor scale is constructed:
A to B : tone
B to C : semi-tone
C to D : tone
D to E : tone
E to F : semi-tone
F to G : tone
G to A : semi-tone
Your A Minor practice routine is at our website, go check it out now.
Major Pentatonic Scales
As you can probably guess from the name this scale has something to do with 5. In fact it contains only 5 notes, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th notes from the Major scale. If we want to look at the C Major Pentatonic scale and work out which notes it contains we get C, D, E, G, A.
Your C Major Pentatonic practice routine:
The 4 most commonly used scales are the minor pentatonic, major pentatonic, major and minor scales. We'll start by looking at each of these in this guitar lesson. You will go through a simple exercise for each guitar scale to build your familiarity and speed with each scale, by the end of this lesson you will be ready to jam with Kirk Hammett!
As you learn guitar scales and put the theory into practice you should aim to use alternate picking, which is, a down strum for the first note and an up strum for the second and continue to move from down to up as you continue.
The only other tool I would recommend besides a good pick is a metronome or backing track where you can set the tempo. You will want to practice these guitar scales at very slow tempos to begin with.
The Major Scale
The Major scale is first on the list of guitar scales you are going to learn. Each guitar scale follows a certain pattern, this is what you want to commit to memory. We will be looking at the C Major Scale as our example:
C to D : tone
D to E : tone
E to F : semi-tone
F to G : tone
G to A : tone
A to B : tone
B to C : semi-tone
Your C Major Homework can be accessed for free anytime at my website.
Minor Scales
Just like the Major scales the Minor guitar scales use a tonal pattern to work out which notes fit. You can find the relative Minor of a Major scale by identifying the 6th note in the Major Scale. For our C Major Scale this is A, and here is how the Minor scale is constructed:
A to B : tone
B to C : semi-tone
C to D : tone
D to E : tone
E to F : semi-tone
F to G : tone
G to A : semi-tone
Your A Minor practice routine is at our website, go check it out now.
Major Pentatonic Scales
As you can probably guess from the name this scale has something to do with 5. In fact it contains only 5 notes, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 6th notes from the Major scale. If we want to look at the C Major Pentatonic scale and work out which notes it contains we get C, D, E, G, A.
Your C Major Pentatonic practice routine:
Minor Pentatonic Scale on Guitar
Another scale with just 5 notes and possibly the most widely used scale in lead guitar parts, you will find this everywhere. First find out what key the song is in, if it is in something like C Major we know how to get to A Minor, now we cherry pick the 5 notes using the method for the Major Pentatonic scale and get A, C, D, E, and G.
Your homework assignment for the A Minor scale is something which will get you onto the road of becoming a lead guitarist. I want you to first find a YouTube video for Eric Clapton's incredibly famous song "Layla". Listen to it the whole way through 3-5 times first.
What I want you to do is use the Minor Pentatonic scale in the key of D (starting on the 5th fret of the A string) and just improvise in time with the music over the chorus and solo. Anything goes so don't be shy, have fun with it and I hope you find out how exciting improvising can be. Here's the solo that you can use to practice with:
Mastering lead guitar is something that all guitarists should undertake, Adam Summers provides more information so you can learn how to play guitar as quickly as possible. Check out the extra resources under Lead Guitar so you can learn guitar scales fast.
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