Friday, March 11, 2011

Learn Guitar Scales To Increase Musicianship

By Jonathan Hart


Many kinds of music features solos on the guitar. Rock, classical, jazz, folk, and blues music have guitar solos in them. These might be performances of previously rehearsed phrases of music, or they might be improvised during the performance. In any case, soloing is made easier for anyone who takes the time to learn guitar scales.



Some guitarists learn solos by memorizing finger patterns on the fretboard without realizing the relationships between the many solos they are familiar with. Some guitarists, and other musicians as well, have the ability to sight read music; that is, they can play a piece of written music the first time they see it. But some of these musicians never gain an understanding of how to create original music.

Many people want to experience the act of creation through composition or improvisation. Acquiring knowledge of the scales is the first step in doing this. Playing, transposing and substituting scales allows one to gain insight into how Western music works.

Fortunately, the guitar is one of the easier instruments on which to master this. By learning a single finger pattern on the fretboard for playing a major scale, one can easily play a lot of other scales. It is best to learn more than one pattern, however. Some patterns may be more comfortable to different people because of the various shapes of fingers out there.

Sliding a finger pattern to different positions on the neck makes it easy to transpose a scale to any major key. Relative minors of these keys are played using the same finger pattern, but starting on a different note. Next, these skills can be used to play familiar phrases. As an example, one can play a subset of the major scale notes to make the pentatonic scale used in jazz, rock and blues.

Using the ear while playing allows development of musicianship. Composing and improvising will follow from knowledge of scales and a developed ear. This increases the enjoyment of music.




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