How To Play Scales On Guitar

You can play scales on guitar to warm up your fingers and to keep your hands in playing condition. This means daily practice of a number of scales which give certain challenges to the groups of muscles involved in guitar playing, keeping them on their toes, so to speak.

There is also the kind of practice you do to actually learn a scale and become familiar with how it sounds. You can also learn to play a scale in various positions so that you will have a number of different sounds or tonal possibilities at your command. Try playing a few notes down at the first position and then try at various places further up the neck and you will see how different they sound. For example, the note E on the open first string sounds different if it is played at the fifth fret of the second string or the ninth fret on the third string.

There are various ways of practicing scales on the guitar like for instance, starting with an open string and playing your scale all the way up the string. Or you could just find the notes in whatever chords you are learning at the moment and turn them into scales. Another way of playing scales is to confine your fingers to a certain group of frets and find the scale within those frets. Here’s an example of the C major scale played within the first three frets on the guitar:

e |——————————0-1-3–|

B |————————0-1-3——–|

G |——————–0-2————–|

D |————–0-2-3——————|

A |——–0-2-3————————|

E |–0-1-3——————————|

Scales are useful for practicing techniques like all up or all down strokes with the pick or to work on your hammer-ons and pull-offs. This is a good place to talk about HOW we play scales on guitar. You should be motivated by keeping your left and right arms and hands relaxed as you practice. Don’t do fast, repetitive practice of a scale until you know it well. If you are trying to play a scale fast and you are not certain of where your fingers are going next, this uncertainty will always stay in your muscles when you play that particular scale.

Here’s a video on the subject of playing scales in various positions on the guitar.