Learning guitar scales can be a very frustrating experience for many guitarists. It’s very easy to feel totally overwhelmed with just how much needs to be learnt. To learn and master every possible guitar scale out there would take many lifetimes. Because of this, many guitarists find it hard even knowing where to start!
In this article I’ll reveal three powerful tips to help you in your quest for guitar scale mastery. They are designed to help reduce any feelings of overwhelm that you may currently have. Let’s take a look at the tips now…
**Tip #1: Figure out WHY you want to learn scales and become invested in that outcome.
This is really important and common sense but is often overlooked. Before you decide to take any action, your mind must first have a reason to do anything. Believe you can achieve it, picture yourself achieving it, and imagine the feeling of success in this area. If you do not have a WHY, a reason to do, you will burn out of motivation quickly. By skipping right to the “what to do”, you will give up at the first sign of struggle. Once you figure out your why, then you can focus on the what.
It is vital to introduce some structure into your scale learning process. Rather than aimlessly practicing guitar scales, you want to become laser focused. This is achieved by writing down things such as…
– How much time each day you will devote to scale practice.
– What guitar scales you need to learn, in order to play the style of music that you love.
– What keys are the most common to the style of music that you play.
– What specific things that you don’t understand yet.
If you don’t know how to work out the stuff above, then I recommend booking a free guitar lesson and in one lesson, I will show you how to use scales to make actual music.
**Tip #2: Learn one scale at a time.**
A major reason why many guitarists never master guitar scales is that they try to learn too many at once. This usually causes them to learn patterns without any understanding of how to apply what they just learned. Learning guitar scales is a lot of fun when you apply the other elements of lead guitar playing to make beautiful music. If you are learning guitar scales just for sake of learning scales, you will become bored, frustrated, and stop growing as a guitarist. They may know lots of scales, but they definitely haven’t mastered any. This causes them to sound very unmusical when they improvise. They just sound like they are running up-and-down scales.
**Tip #3: Don’t worry about trying to learn guitar scales in all 12 keys in the beginning.**
Learning guitar scales in all 12 keys leads to a feeling of massive overwhelm for guitarists! It takes time and persistence to learn a scale to mastery in one key. Especially if you want to know that scale over the entire fretboard AND be able to improvise fluently with it. For some guitarists, just thinking that they need to do this in all 12 keys is too much. They just give up! Here is a much better approach…
1. Find out what the most common keys are for the style of music that you play. An experienced guitar teacher will be able to help you speed up the process of learning guitar scales.
2. List the keys in order. You will put the most common key at the top, and the least common key at the bottom.
3. Master the key that is at the top of the list.
4. Start learning how to APPLY that scale in musical settings. Great guitar players are obsessed with MASTERY. Average guitar players just want to learn new content, but can not use that information.
There we have it! Implement these three tips and turbo-charge your ability to learn guitar scales!