Guitar scales are the single most essential technique to help develop individual finger strength and develop your ears to pick out musical patterns. Scales are also the fundamental foundation for guitar soloing. If you know a scale like the minor pentatonic scale, you only need to add minimum improvisation and it already sounds like 80% of guitar solos.

Here are the five standard scales you will want to learn:

- Major

- Minor

- Major Pentatonic

- Minor Pentatonic

- Blues

In my personal experience, scales are great for speed building and helped me to improvise and play riffs and short solo’s on the spot.

Whether you need to learn guitar scales counts on what type of musician you want to be. Do you want to write your own stuff or play with a band? Scales give you a view of what notes fit along with what progressions. If you merely want to be a rhythm guitarist who merely plays other peoples stuff then you might not need to bother with them.

If you know your scales, then when you perform with a bunch of musicians, and they tell you the song is a particular key, you’ll know which notes to play.

If you understand only the basic major and minor scales, you can understand how to form any type of chord, produce melodies, and harmony parts, as well as lead parts and solos, and NEVER hit a note that doesn’t sound correct.

Most people that don’t learn scales will eventually learn these patterns on their own, but it normally takes longer, and they cant communicate their ideas as well as someone who knows the names of all these things.

Scales are the whole basis of western harmony. Learning the scales will acclimatize you to most of the ins and outs of rock musical harmony. it would probably also be worth it to learn the other modes as well (major and minor are just ionian and aeolian).

Trust me, ITS WORTH THE EFFORT.

Take a look at my other learn guitar articles.

Chords and scales are the most essential part of learning to play the guitar. There are literally thousands of chords and not all of them are necessary. You need to know A B C D E F G and their minors as well. Once you have learnt those, you need to learn 7th chords. These are the most basic chords you need to know.

If all you require is the pictures for guitar chords, the best place to go to is:

http://www.all-guitar-chords.com

This will show you more chords than you will need to know or use.

There is an easy way to learn chords that just requires memorizing a few chords and the notes of the 5th and 6th strings (the two low strings).

Go to website mentioned and look at the E Major chord. The diagram doesn’t show the fingerings, but the text books usually say to set the first finger on the third string, the second finger on the fifth string, and the third finger on the fourth string.

Alternatively, what you can do is to lift up the first finger and use the second finger on the third string, the third finger on the fifth string, and the little finger on the fourth string.

While maintaining the fingers on the strings, run them up the neck to a different place and place the first finger across the strings, making a bar, at the fret below the second finger. The strings that were previously being played open, are now being played at the first finger bar.

This now allows you to play any major chord by moving the chord to a different fret. The root note of the chord is on the sixth string, meaning you will have to learn the notes on the sixth string.

Open - E. 1st fret - F. 3rd - G. 5th - A. 7th - B. 8th - C. 10th - D. 12th - back to E and so on. The sharp and flat notes fall at the frets in between. So if you’re first finger bar is at the fifth fret, you are playing the A Major chord.

Now take a look at the E Minor chord. It’s the same chord but with the third string now played open. You can use the same principle to play this Minor chord at any place on the guitar neck.

Next take a look at the E7 chord, not the Emaj7, this is a different chord. Once Again, it’s the same as the E Major chord, this time it’s the fourth string that’s played open. And again, it can be played at any position on the neck.

You can now play any Major, Minor, or 7th chord by just learning one chord and moving up or down the neck.

If you don’t want to keep moving your hands up and down the neck so much to change chords, you can use another chord formation.

This time, take a look at the A Major chord. Here you can see that the root note is on the fifth string. Rather than hold the three notes down with individual fingers, I place the third finger across the three strings and use the first finger to bar the remaining strings.

Playing the chord this way, you might find that the first string gets muted. It just takes practice, but it might not matter too much if you are playing rock with distortion. Likewise note, it shows that you don’t play the sixth string. You can because that note is part of the chord. The reason they show the sixth string as not played is because, in theory, the lowest note played must be root note of the chord, which is the fifth string.

Whether you play the sixth string or not is up to you. Whether the first string is played or muted, again it’s up to you.

To use this chord, you need to learn the notes on the fifth string.

Open - A. 2nd fret - B. 3rd - C. 5th - D. 7th - E. 8th - F. 10th - G. 12th - back to A and so on.

So now, if you’re playing a G chord at the third fret with the E style chord, you don’t have to go all the way up to the eighth fret to play C. Just pick up the third and little fingers and lay the third finger down across the second, third, and fourth strings, with the first finger still holding the bar at the third fret.

You can do the same with the A Minor chord and A7 chord. You should be getting the idea now.

A simpler way to play the A7 chord is to leave the third finger bar in place from the A Major chord and set the little finger on the third fret of the first string. This still gives the A7 chord and can still be played at different positions on the neck.

Power chords are real simple. Say you want a G power chord. Find the G note on the sixth string which is at the third fret. Put your first finger there. Place your third finger two frets up on the fifth string which is the fifth fret. That’s your G power chord.

This is theoretically a G5 chord. If you know your major scales, the note on the fifth string is the fifth note of the major scale.

This can also be done up and down the fret board.

You can also do this using the fifth and fourth strings with the note on the fifth string being the root note.

You can also play the power chords with three strings. With the G power chord, place the third finger over both the fifth and fourth strings at the fifth fret. This extra note on the fourth string is another G note an octave higher.

With the fifth string root note power chord, move the third finger down on to the fourth string and leave the first finger barring both the fifth and sixth strings. The extra note on the sixth string is another fifth note of the major scale an octave lower.

If you would like to know more about learning guitar scales and guitar notes, go to:

http://www.howplayguitar.co.uk/learn-guitar/scales/

and

http://www.howplayguitar.co.uk/learn-guitar/notes/

There are a few questions that people ask when thay are thinking about learning the guitar. I’m, hopefully going to answer those questions for you.

The first, and most obvious question is:
How to learn guitar?

There are a number of ways to learn how to play the guitar:

Get a friend to instruct you.
This is a good idea just to get someone to show you at least how to hold the guitar and how to play the strings and hold down the strings at the frets. This is a good way to get started if you’re just starting and have never picked up a guitar before and won’t cost you anything. Don’t rely on this method alone though. You should just get the very basics and then start to teach yourself from the other methods. You can always let your friend show you some tips and tricks later on when they have time.

Purchase a book.
This is ok to show you how to hold and play the guitar, but not as good as someone showing you. It’s not free unless you can find out a good book from the library. The price of guitar books varies from cheap to costly, you might be able to find them at charity shops. I find that books are great for learning theory. Depending on what style of guitar you want to learn, you might not need to learn much theory. The more theory you can acquire the better, but you can always do that as you are progressing.

Purchase a video or DVD.
I’ve never been too keen on applying this method solely. Sitting in front of the television screen or computer screen watching someone tell you to lay this finger here and that finger there. It’s good for showing you the basics of playing the guitar and some techniques like bends, slides, and hammer ons, etc.

Pay a guitar teacher to learn you.
This could be the most costly way to learn the guitar. I’ve seen friends and relatives kids play songs better than me and I’ve felt pretty stupid. But, that’s all they’ve been learnt, just songs. I comfort myself by saying yes, you can play that song, but how much has it cost your parents. I’ve seen a video recording of a friends girl performing on stage with other students and she played a popular song note perfect, even the solo. She actually played it better than the original guitar player used to play it live. Only all she was doing was playing notes that she’d learnt parrot fashion. There wasn’t even any emotion or enthusium on her face. If someone said now play that in a different key or improvise and alter the solo, she probably wouldn’t have been able to. Incidentally, the guitar lessons have finished and I don’t think she plays the guitar much now.

Learn on the internet.
Once you can hold and play your guitar, or even before, explore the net for free or cheap on-line courses. There’s so much information on learning to play the guitar on the internet, this must be a great source. This can be free, cheap, or dear but don’t be fooled into buying expensive courses that you can’t afford or don’t need though. When you’re ready, there’s a lot of good low cost or free stuff that will improve your playing. Learning to play the guitar on the internet has all of the the advantages of the other methods. You can learn as little or as much theory as you want . You can have someone on the computer screen in front of you showing what to do and how to do it. You can download the info on to your computer and do it in your own time and at your own pace. You can download the guitar tabs to songs you want to learn.

How hard is it to learn to play guitar?
It’s not difficult at all. It just depends on how much you want to learn it. When I told my brother I wanted to learn to play the guitar, he was already playing bass guitar in a group, he told me it’s easier to learn to play the piano. It might be but I didn’t want to play the piano. Actually, it’s much easier learning to play the guitar with guitar tabs than it is the piano with standard music notation.

How long does it take to learn how to play guitar?
As much time as you put into it. It’s a process and you will never perfect it, so the time is forever. But to get just enough to know how to play many songs, not that long, just a total of several hours. But if you want to become an artist, write songs, etc. That takes the time and passion. And when you have the passion the time gets away from you.