We will start our journey by looking into the four basic guitar scales that you will need to master, they are the major, minor, major pentatonic and minor pentatonic. After looking at each guitar scale you will be given a practice routine and by the end of this guitar lesson you will be ready to kick out the jams with Tom Morello!

The best picking technique to use when learning how to play guitar scales is the alternate picking method, it is simply a down stroke on the first note followed by an up stroke on the second, then alternating back and forth as you progress through the scale or practice routine.

I can not emphasize enough the importance of playing to a metronome or an adjustable tempo track, start off with a tempo that is very comfortable for you, one that you can easily play in time to without thinking too much.

The Major Scale

Major scales sound great when you use them in short runs, we’re going to look at them first in this guitar lesson. The tonal pattern for the Major Scale is below, you will want to write this down somewhere and study it until it becomes tattooed on your brain. So we have something to work with we will look at the C Major Scale.

C to D : tone

D to E : tone

E to F : semi-tone

F to G : tone

G to A : tone

A to B : tone

B to C : semi-tone

There’s a C major exercise for you to try at our website, completely free of course, just look for the Learn Guitar Scales section.

The Minor Scale

Just like the Major scales the Minor guitar scales use a tonal pattern to work out which notes fit. You can find the relative Minor of a Major scale by identifying the 6th note in the Major Scale. For our C Major Scale this is A, and here is how the Minor scale is constructed:

A to B : tone

B to C : semi-tone

C to D : tone

D to E : tone

E to F : semi-tone

F to G : tone

G to A : semi-tone

The exercise for the A Minor can be freely accessed at InstantGuitarist.com under Learn Guitar Scales.

Major Pentatonic Scales

A pentatonic scale is one that is comprised of only 5 notes, and as such these are easy to learn and use when improvising over backing tracks and creating new lead lines. To create a Major Pentatonic scale we take just the first, second, third, fifth and sixth notes from the Major Scale. So looking at our C Major Scale this would work out to be the notes: C, D, E, G and A.

Your C Major Pentatonic practice routine:

The Minor Pentatonic Scale

Time for the big boy, this is what you will use most of the time. The Minor Pentatonic Scale is easy to learn and fun to play, as with the Major version it contains just 5 notes and can be found from the relative minor to the key you are playing. For C Major we get to A Minor and the A Minor pentatonic guitar scale has the following notes A – C – D – E – G.

Your homework assignment for the A Minor scale is something which will get you onto the road of becoming a lead guitarist. I want you to first find a YouTube video for Eric Clapton’s incredibly famous song “Layla”. Listen to it the whole way through 3-5 times first.

What I want you to do is use the Minor Pentatonic scale in the key of D (starting on the 5th fret of the A string) and just improvise in time with the music over the chorus and solo. Anything goes so don’t be shy, have fun with it and I hope you find out how exciting improvising can be. Here’s the solo that you can use to practice with:

Mastering lead guitar is something that all guitarists should undertake, Adam Summers provides more information so you can learn how to play guitar as quickly as possible. Check out the extra resources under Lead Guitar so you can learn guitar scales fast.

The holy grail for the beginner guitarist is being able to get their fingers to go to the right place, apply the right amount of pressure and not accidentally touch adjacent strings. No easy task. On top of that learning how to change from one chord to another and in time with the music is usually enough to send guitars flying. Follow these instructions carefully and you will bypass these obstacles.

I don’t think any guitar lesson is complete without applying the theory to a real world example and a practice routine you can use by yourself. We will cover a simple song using just three of the four chords you are about to learn and I will provide a routine for you to add to your daily, or weekly practice schedule that will help solidify this knowledge.

Open Chord: E Major

The EMaj Open Chord uses the notes E, B and G#. The Low E String is played open to give you the E, the A String is fretted by your 2nd finger at the 2nd fret to give you the B note, the D String is fretted by your 3rd finger at the 2nd fret to give you another E note, and the G String is fretted by your 1st finger at the 1st fret to give a G#. The rest of the strings are played open to give the final B and E notes.

GMaj Open Chord

Place your 1st finger on the 2nd string from the top, 2nd fret. Your 2nd finger on the top string 3rd fret, and your 3rd finger on the bottom string on the 3rd fret.

The C Major Open Chord

For this one we only strum from the 5th string down. Place your 1st finger on the 5th string from the top 1st fret, your 2nd finger 3rd string from the top 2nd fret and your 3rd finger 2nd string from the top 3rd fret.

The D Major Open Chord

The open chord D Major uses just the bottom four strings on your guitar, strum from the Open D String down. Place your 1st finger at the 2nd fret on the G String, your 2nd finger at the 2nd fret on the High E String and your 3rd finger at the 3rd fret on the B String. The Root Note is D which is played as the Open D String.

Now let’s put our theory into practice, we’re going to learn Knocking On Heaven’s Door by Guns N Roses, it’s a simple chord progression of 2 downstrokes of the G Major Chord, moving to 2 downstrokes of the D Major Chord and finishing with 4 downstrokes of the C Major Chord. You can find a backing track to play to by searching Google for “Knocking of Heavens Door backing track”.

I want to now give you the tools needed to practice the finger positions, strumming technique and changing between these four guitar chords. Remember to strum from the Root Note down for each chord. So the E and G Major chords start from the top, the C Major from the 2nd string down, and the D Major from the 3rd string down. Choose a sequence to follow for your practice session, for example G-D-C-E, and play each chord four times being mindful to make each note ring out clearly. Spend several minutes getting into the correct position for each chord before doing your four strums, then move onto the next.

Each day change the order of the chords, so if you chose E – G – D – C today, tomorrow you might choose D – C – E – G. The trick is to keep going over this loop until you can change to the next chord without skipping a beat, or without stopping your foot from tapping.

Take these four chords and practice getting your fingers into position, you don’t even need to strum them, I used to sit in front of the TV with my guitar just moving my fingers into different chord positions, when I came to play the next day I noticed my speed and finger strength had already improved.

Adam Summers is out to bust the myth that you need money to learn how to play guitar. What you really need is a teacher who’s looking out for your best interests and time to practice. Check out some more free resources on guitar chords for beginners at InstantGuitarist.com.

While trying to figure out the different sounds the guitarists use in each solo I came across a blog called “Get That Sound” which has posts about popular songs and the settings used to achieve the particular tone for the song.

Check them out here: Get That Sound

Another good resource for more easy guitar solos can be found on the Free Licks website, they’ve done a great job of compiling more solos for you to learn. Unfortunately I don’t have the right plugin to view the content, hopefully you can take a look for me and let me know what it’s like:

http://www.freelicks.net/Popular_solos.htm

And finally a website about how to play guitar solos. This is more of a discussion rather than a straight tutorial but there are some great nuggets of advice in there:

http://www.howtoplayguitarsolos.net/

Take it easy,
Adam

The amount of guitar licks possible are endless, not just virtually endless, they are endless. So why should you practice some and not others?

I like to divide the good guitar licks I come across into 3 categories

1. The licks I will use as warm-ups in my practice routines
2. The licks I will use in conjuction with my own improvisation, and
3. The licks I like the sound of, but will modify for my own use and turn into something completely different

And I guess there’s a fourth category of the guitar licks I’ll just throw away and never come back to.

To get an idea of how licks are concocted and sourced, most of the licks you’ll find online are those from individual players who are expressing themselves and recording it for others to use, the other source is from people who have transcribed their favorite licks from artists and made them available for public use.

It’s often easier to find a guitar lick in the style you’re after by searching by an artist’s name. However, you can repurpose any musical score into different tempo’s keys, breaking down certain parts, giving it room to breathe.

For a series of pictures and tutorial check out: b chord guitar.

What I want to discuss here, and get your opinion on is the underlying problem that holds people back trying to learn this seemingly impossible b chord for so long.

One of my first thoughts was finger strength, the ability to press down hard enough on the strings to make sure each note sounds cleanly. This is true to some extent but it’s not the complete picture. I think something else is at play.

Finger stretching, anyone? I can remember I had a lot of trouble trying to stretch my fingers to make any kind of barre shape, this was a real sticking point for me, but after a few weeks of putting it into my practice schedule I had it nailed.

I think the main thing to remember is to make sure you’re including all of the fundamental exercises in your practice sessions, even if its not on the same day, so long as they’re spread out over the week then you will see some extroadinary results.

I’m talking about doing finger strength training exercises on Monday, Finger stretching on Tuesday, maybe Ear training on Wednesday …

Check out that link, and if you want a Free Instant Guitarist Starter Pack (yes I’m still giving them away!) go to Learn how to play guitar.

Take care,