Guitar Scales Exercises

[Bartlett Vallee]

Whilethe exercises in this lesson work out of a single position of the major scale, the concepts should be applied to all positions of major and minor scales. The exercises can even be adapted to the pentatonic scale.

Starting with the root note, the second note you play will be the major 3rd. On your next note you move up one note from the root to the major 2nd and then play the perfect 4th, which is a third from the major 2nd, and continue with this pattern.

These patterns can also be combined to make one continuous pattern. You can also change the pedal note to a different note in the scale. For some additional pedal point exercises, check out the 5 Pedal Point Licks Make Great Lead Guitar Exercises lesson.

This last exercise is a combination pattern where the movement is both ascending and descending at the same time. The first note in the exercise starts the ascending run and the second note starts the descending run.

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Being a guitarist is a lot like being an athlete. A certain amount of practice has to go toward general maintenance of your playing on both a physical and mental level. You have to do exercises that will keep your skills in a state of readiness, so that when the time comes to go out and play you can do so in the best way possible. There are also times that you might need to regain a level of fitness after a period of inactivity.

First, you can practice playing your scale pattern up and down, from the lowest note to the highest and then back again, with out skipping any notes. Start at a slow, easy speed doing 2 notes per beat and gradually build from there.

To do this, set your metronome at a speed that is close to, but slightly below, the top speed you ended up with before. Then play the scale pattern up and down, but change the number of notes you play per beat as you go along. Do a couple beats where you are playing 2 notes per beat, then a couple where you are playing 4 notes per beat, then a couple beats where you do 3 notes per beat, and so on.

This will really tighten up your sense of rhythm and the different ways beats can be subdivided while you are playing. One of the best things that you can do to make your soling sound better is to diversify and tighten up the rhythms that you play, and this is a great exercise for both.

There are a bunch of possible sequences out there you could do. Any mathematical pattern that allows you to gradually make your way though a scale pattern will work. Generally, the larger your jumps are in a sequence, the more challenging it will be. You just have to choose for yourself what sequences will help you most with the music you will be playing. These are just examples.

Note that with most software that changes the speed of a recording, you can push the speed faster than it was originally recorded. I often do that when doing this exercise, since many of the backing tracks out there are either at a slow or medium tempo.

Scale Exercises are the source of a lot of problems. I remember running into this myself when I was starting out and I also hear about it often from students. You practice a lot of exercises, but is it really helping you play better, or are you just repeating the same exercises without getting anywhere?

What is maybe a little weird about them is that they are not all the type of exercise that you work on everyday for months with a metronome, because there are other things you need to learn besides technique, and there are other ways to practice than using a metronome. I think one of them is also a very powerful and practical way to build a fretboard overview.

With a build-up like this is then it is maybe a bit of a disappointment that the first exercise is practicing the scale, since you are hopefully doing that already and you probably trying to not sound like you are playing scales when you solo and want to develop your musicality. But, playing the scale and knowing what notes are in there is important and as you will see it will serve as a foundation for everything else in this video plus that it is the shortest exercise you can imagine with a scale,

I learned this exercise the first time I went to a Barry Harris masterclass in the Hague, and it was an exercise that changed everything about how I practiced and made it all much closer connected to the music that I wanted to learn to play: Bebop. And for me, the goal of all of these exercises is to help you play better Jazz, and this exercise is actually a direct link to the music, and I think it is crazy that not everyone teaches this to their students.

You can probably tell that there are obvious technical benefits to working on this exercise, but if you are also aware of what notes and what arpeggios you are playing then you are really connecting some very important information on the guitar to the chords you want to solo over.

Doing this exercise makes it possible for you to take a Jazz standard and play arpeggios through the entire progression, which is a great beginning for internalizing a song and having a place to start with soloing over it, where you take an arpeggio and build a phrase around it.

Besides being a very solid foundation for improvising over chords and learning songs then it will also give you a lot more material, because if you analyze transcriptions of great Jazz musicians then you will find a lot of other arpeggios being used besides the arpeggio of the chord itself, and you are completely ready for doing that if you work on this exercise.

When you are playing Jazz then you are both playing solos and chords because you are not soloing ALL the time, and you can practice chords in scales as well, which for me was a very useful way to work on exploring new voicings, getting familiar with diatonic chords and how their extensions sound. You can even do chords in scale positions.

This exercise is such a simple concept but when I first came across it then it immediately resonated with me and it really sounds like Jazz, already as an exercise. Of course, this comes from how frequently it is a building block in Jazz solos and especially Bebop lines. When I was given the exercise then I had already heard it 1000s of times in the solos Charlie Parker, Pat Martino and Wes Montgomery, so playing it really just made that click into place and gave me tons of phrases to use in my solos.

I am, as you may have guessed, talking about the Bebop arpeggio exercise, which I have also mentioned in other videos, and this was an exercise that I learned the first time I was at a Barry Harris workshop in the Hague.

Obviously this is just the tip of the iceberg, and you can do so much more with adding chromatic notes or even chromatic phrases to arpeggios or intervals, and they will all be good exercise, in fact any vocabulary that you like is probably worth taking apart and turning into exercises.

I remember when I was starting out and with a lot of the songs I could solo over, then there would be chords where I did not have the freedom to move around on the neck, I was stuck in a single position. if I had been given these exercises then that would have developed a lot faster than it did, in fact this is probably the most practical and efficient fretboard knowledge exercise that you can work on.

There are two ways you can approach this, which are different takes on the geometry of the guitar, and both are equally useful. In the end, you can use both long and short phrases and explore how it is to move them around, but for this I will stick to a relatively short phrase which is a pivot arpeggio

This phrase combines an altered dominant with the key of the II V I which is a really useful connection, and taking it through the keys help you identify important building blocks in those keys and also know what the altered dominant is in those keys, which is (obviously) going to be very useful, we are not all playing in bands like AC/DC where 85% of the songs are in A.

If you are working on this exercise with licks that have common progressions and common building blocks then this is a great exercise for your playing, fretboard overview, ear training and vocabulary. It is good for a LOT of things.

As I mentioned in the beginning of this section then I found myself in a place where I was practicing scales in all positions, but I was only able to solo in some of those positions. I only knew how to play the scale in some places without having any vocabulary. Taking a simple phrase and then sticking to one key, but exploring how to play it in all positions is in a way the guitar version of moving a lick through 12 keys, and that can be an exercise that really opens up scale positions for you. When you find the building blocks that you need in each position by moving some lines through the positions, then it gets easier to solo in those positions. In fact, I was given this exercise by a teacher later when I moved to Copenhagen and it did indeed quickly start to do exactly that for my playing. This is also the kind of exercise that you can explore doing with the shot solos from the book the Joe Pass Guitar Style to get more out of them, but you can check that video out later.

If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions for topics then, please let me know. Leave a comment on the video or send me an e-mail. That is the best way for me to improve my lessons and make them fit what you are searching for.

In this video, I am going to talk about how you can start practicing exercises that are much closer to what you need in your solos and be more free when you improvise. This can really open up your playing so that you find it easier to create and play lines that sound great.

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