Learn the Main Guitar Scales in This Easy Guitar Playing Guide

Scales are the backbone of lead guitar works. They make it simple to produce awesome single-note melodies.

By learning scales, you begin to understand music theory. This makes you a much better guitarist because you gain a deeper understanding of your instrument.

If you want to learn the main guitar scales, read the rest of this article.

All About Guitar Scales

A guitar scale is a set of steps connecting two fixed musical points. Referred to as “root notes,” these two fixed points always correspond to the same note but in different octaves.

Guitar scales are composed of note patterns. There are 12 notes between the lower root note and the higher root note, comprising a full octave.

Because of these 12 notes, we can combine various patterns and permutations to produce beautiful guitar music.

The Major Scales

Understanding how the major scale works is critical because its pattern serves as the yardstick for describing other musical sounds. Every chord and scale is named based on its relationship to this scale.

Thus, if you want to practise guitar scales, this is the best place to start.

Patterns and Root Notes

An important point to remember is that scale patterns are moveable. The tonality of the scale is determined by where you begin playing it.

There is a tonic or root note in every scale. The root note is used to name the scale.

For example, in the G Major scale, the root note is G. It’s the note that will sound the best and provide a sense of closure to the riffs, licks, and solos you play.

The Minor Scales

The Minor scale is the other scale you must learn if you want to learn scales. Minor scales are classified into three:

• The Natural Minor Scale
• The Harmonic Minor Scale
• The Melodic Minor Scale

When people talk about the minor scale, they almost always mean the Natural Minor Scale. This is the “main” version of the three minor scales.

The Natural Minor Scale is a complementary scale to the Major Scale. If you’re going to play scales, you should be aware of the mood they create. This scale sounds sad and melancholy, and it stands in stark contrast to the Major Scale, which is bright and happy.

The Minor scale also lays the groundwork for the Minor Pentatonic and the Blues Scales.

The Major and Minor Pentatonic Scales

The Major Pentatonic Scale is a condensed version of the Major scale with the same pattern.

Guitar students frequently think that the Major Scale is an entirely different scale than the Major Pentatonic Scale. But the truth is, the Major Pentatonic Scale is the same as the Major Scale pattern, albeit in a more simplified form.

Similarly, the Minor Pentatonic Scale is a simplified version of the Minor Scale. If you want to learn scales for solos and lead guitar, the Minor Pentatonic Scale is the best scale to start with.

So, if you learn how to play the Major and Minor Scales, all you have to do is get used to leaving those two notes out of each octave.

The Blues Scales

The Minor Pentatonic Scale is tied to the Blues Scale. It sounds great in most rock, indie, country, and blues settings.

It is a versatile scale since you can often play it in both major and minor keys. It won’t work with every chord progression, but it will work with a lot of them.

How to Determine Keys

The simplest way to play lead guitar is to play notes from a scale corresponding to the song’s key.

So, if the key is C Major, playing a riff or solo with notes from the C Major Scale will sound fantastic.

The easiest way to determine the key of a song is to examine the first and last chords, which are frequently the same chord. The song’s key is one of those two chords 99% of the time.

Practise Your Scales

When learning guitar scales, the first step is to memorise the scale pattern.

The easiest way to do this is to divide the scale into bite-sized chunks. To begin, concentrate solely on box 1 for the scale. The notes in all boxes cover two octaves.

We can simplify things even further by focusing solely on the first octave of box 1. So the simplest way to learn guitar scales is to split the scale boxes into octaves 1 and 2.

This octave-splitting method may not appear necessary for box 1 of simple patterns, such as the Minor Pentatonic Scale. But for more complicated scale patterns, this approach can make things manageable and allow you to learn guitar scales quickly and consistently.