A Review of Guitar Scale Mastery
Learning scales for guitar over the entire fretboard is a lot easier than you think. It will also improve your lead guitar soloing and speed. This is only true if you use a method that you find interesting and easy to use.
Most methods I’ve tried present the scales on the guitar as a patterns of blocks on the neck of the guitar. You memorise one block pattern and then move up the fretboard and learn the next one.
I’ve always struggled to move up and down to different places on the fretboard using this method. It teaches you to move across the strings and you get stuck to one or two places.
So what if you do manage to memorise all the block patterns for a scale. You’ve then got to do it for all the other scales and keys. I learnt the G blues scale from a book years ago. I learnt the first two or three blocks by memory but found it boring to continue.
I’d struggle to change it to a different key. I could just about manage two blocks.
What Guitar Scale Mastery does is to show you how to learn guitar scales one string at a time, and it’s a lot faster and easier than you might think.
Once you’ve learnt where the notes of the scale are all the way up each string, those block patterns you tried to learn before just come naturally.
There’s theory in this, and again it’s set out in such an easy way that you will wonder why you struggled so much before.
There’s also a lot of practical exercises that reinforce your scale training. There’s single string, two string, and three string exercises that will have you playing guitar solos across and up and down the fretboard.
What you eventually get is a feeling for the notes in the scale and it just comes naturally to play them. Learning to play the scale in a different key then becomes so much easier. And you can then use the same techniques to learn a different scale.
What surprised me the most is the first scale you learn, E major. Now that scale has four sharps in it, F sharp, G sharp, C sharp, and D sharp. I listed those straight out of my head. Before, I would have been counting along the frets on the strings and working out the notes.
When I first started learning music theory, the book I was learning from started with the C major scale which has no sharps or flats in it. The G major scales is next which has one sharp in it, F sharp. After that you get bored and give up.
You don’t get bored and give up with Guitar Scale Mastery. It’s fun and interesting to do. It doesn’t matter how many sharps or flats are in a scale, it just becomes natural to play the right notes.
This isn’t for lazy people, it’s a long term training course that benefits you more the longer you do it. It’s recommended that you give up some time to practice each day. If you’re a keen guitar player, you’re already doing this anyway. I’ve found that even if I don’t pick up my guitar for a couple of weeks, I can still play those scales across and along the fretboard with ease. It’s like riding a bike, you don’t forget how to do it.