Guitar Scales for Beginners: Discover How To Finally Make Sense Of Scales And Supercharge Your Playing Ability With Over 50 Tips, Tricks And Exercises by James Haywire

Author:James Haywire [Haywire, James]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2020-03-11T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

Going Beyond the Basics

In this chapter, we’ll be delving past what we’ve discussed in chapter 2. There, you learned a lot about a variety of different kinds of scales, but I’ve selfishly been keeping the scales themselves from you.

This is by far the longest chapter of this book; we’ll be looking at every nook and cranny of scales as a whole. I’ll lead you through all of the most important ones, and even some less relevant ones.

How To Practice A Scale

You might think that practicing scales is a trivial job. After all, it’s just playing it over and over again, right? Well, not quite. Scales are fairly unique in that it’s very easy to play most of them by themselves, however, the issues pop up when you start mixing notes.

For example, you might find it easy to play a scale forward, but how about backward? How about if you had to stop midway and then switch direction? Most people would find this fairly difficult. After all, it isn’t exactly easy for your mind to switch gears that quickly. This is precisely the reason why I put so much stress on needing to practice a lot. Instead of your mind needing to switch gears, it should be just your head.

Here are some tips that will come in handy for practicing scales in general:

Left Hand:

● Make sure that your left hand is always in a good position, if you start missing notes, it’s probably because you aren’t fretting correctly.

● When you’re moving, try to do it with as little actual movement as possible. Don’t lift and move your fingers more than it’s absolutely necessary.

● While you should move as little as possible, try not to interfere with the fretboard. If your fingers aren’t completely off the fretboard then it’ll sound off. With that being said, you also need to ascertain they aren’t too far off so that you won’t be able to move on time.

● Start in a good location. If you know which scale you’re playing, that means you know roughly where you should put your fretting hand when you begin. Keep putting your hand back there whenever you hit an open string

Right Hand:

● Start by only using downstrokes to practice the scale. What this means is that you’ll be playing the whole scale but only by going down. You don’t need to fiddle around with upstrokes just yet. You want to ensure you’re comfortable with fretting the notes on time and that you’ve memorized the scale’s shape.

● Start mixing in upstrokes, keep going up and down as much as you can. This will let you develop a better understanding of the scale, as well as being quite useful for teaching you how to play better.

● Start playing the scale without repetition. Usually, when you play a scale, you’ll repeat the highest note, now you don’t do that anymore, just keep on playing as if it was a musical piece and not a scale.

● Speed up. The faster you can play the better it is, ensure that you’re only playing as quickly as you’re comfortable with.

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