Introduction to Playing Guitar Scales

Series Summary

Learning how to play guitar like a rock star might get you the admiration of adoring fans, but it might also give you a rewarding passion that you can pursue over the course of a lifetime. In spite of the raw, sore fingertips and the drudgery of daily practice routines, playing the guitar allows you to express yourself in new and exciting ways. And your ability will develop and mature over the course of time, from one level to the next, allowing you to work out more elaborate and creative musical ideas. But this won’t happen by itself—if you want to get good, you have to play through the pain.

In these free guitar lessons on video, learn how to develop your skills even further. Our expert will show you some intermediate level tips to improve your musicianship, including how to play the major scale pattern, the C, E and F major scales, moveable major guitar scales, the A minor scale, how to play in relative major and minor, minor pentatonic scales, how to tune the guitar (relative tuning), and how to read guitar tabs.

It’s a little bit of everything you need to get better at guitar, so let’s get started!

Video Transcript

"In previous lessons, we learned about playing on the open position in the neck, really extending only to the third fret of each string. Now we're going to learn how to open up the rest of the neck to ourselves by learning the step pattern of notes. Frets count as steps, whole steps and half steps, a whole step being two frets and a half step being one. Notes are divided accordingly and we can move the melodies we played before up to different frets, for example, and play higher. Play different scales, we'll learn the different scales, Major and Minor, as well as the pentatonic five note versions. We'll learn how to read tablature too. We already learned some notations, but we also need to know tablature now because we can play notes at different points on the neck that are going to sound the same on different strings. So we need to know what that denotes. So tablature will be a way of looking at our fret board and matching that up with our notation. "