Guitar scales are compared to different ingredients used in cooking, the more ingredients you have, the more variety you can bring to your menu. Same for guitar, if you merely know 2 scales, you are limited to just that – 2 scales. Scales are also employed to reflect the mood of the music. Usually, minor is sad and major is happy. Without getting too much into music theory, in general guitar scales are useful for four reasons:
1. Scales are a collection of notes that when taken collectively help form a certain feeling, mood, or texture. For example, if you want to compose a sad song, you wouldn’t pick out chords from the major scale, you’d get them from the minor scale. That’s one of the biggest benefits of grasping the concepts of scales (and in music theory in general), it helps give you a direction to start from if you want to create a particular mood or feeling.
2. Scales help you write melodies in a particular key or over a certain chord. Melodies based on a certain scale will oftentimes imply the moods, feelings, and textures mentioned above, but the benefit is that if you’re trying to play a lead over a dominant 7th chord, it helps a lot to know which scales match up well with a dominant 7th chord – the mixolydian and major pentatonic, for instance.
3. Guitar scales are the single most essential technique to help acquire individual finger strength and develop your ears to pick out musical patterns.
4. Scales are also the primary foundation for guitar soloing. If you know a scale like the minor pentatonic scale, you merely need to add minimum improvisation and it already sounds like 80% of guitar solos.
Here are the five base scales you will need to learn:
- Major
- Minor
- Major Pentatonic
- Minor Pentatonic
- Blues
In my personal experience, scales are great for speed building and helped me to improvise and play riffs and short solo’s on the spot.
Whether you want to learn guitar scales depends on what type of musician you desire to be. Do you want to write your own stuff or play with a band? Scales give you an idea of what notes should fit along with progressions. If you merely want to be a rhythm guitar player who just plays other peoples stuff then you might not want to bother with them.
If you know your scales, then when you perform with a bunch of musicians, and they tell you the song is a particular key, you’ll know which notes to play.
If you understand just the basic major and minor scales, you can understand how to form any type of chord, create melodies, and harmony parts, as well as lead parts and solos, and NEVER hit a note that doesn’t sound right.
Most people that don’t learn scales will eventually learn these patterns on their own, but it normally takes longer, and they cant put across their ideas as well as somebody who knows the names of all these things.
Scales are the entire basis of western harmony. Learning the scales will acclimatise you to most of the ins and outs of rock musical harmony. It would probably likewise be worth it to learn the other modes as well (major and minor are just ionian and aeolian).
Believe me, ITS WORTH THE EFFORT.
Posted under Miscellaneous Content
This post was written by assistant on September 5, 2011
