You're Closer to Understanding Guitar Scales Than You Think - 479

Understanding guitar scales and patterns

0:00Welcome, friends, to the Play Guitar Podcast. I'm Lee, and I'm here to help you become the guitar player that you've always wanted to be. What is that? What is the guitar player that you've always wanted to be? What does that mean to you? I want to know this. I want to know. Head on over to Play Guitar Academy. There's a contact page. Let me know. I want to know, is it to just do it for yourself? Is it something that's like you just always

0:32wanted to be a part of that? Do you want to play in front of people to be on stage? Do you want to be in a musical situation where you communicate with a different language with other players? Is it something where it's just you've gotten a lot out of music and you would like to learn what that was? What is it that you're hearing? Why is it so powerful? Why do I want to? I'm curious. Very curious. Head over to the website and let me know. I'd love to

1:03know. Today, we're going to be talking about scales a little bit more. When you talk about scales, it's very deceptive because it's not just scales. Scales give you your chords. Scales allow you something to use rhythmically. We're actually at the basis for everything. At some point, almost every guitar player that's developing looks at the different scales they're playing and they play them in different keys. They might be wondering what the more advanced scales are.

1:40They might be wondering how many they've got to learn. Eventually, what's the number? How much time am I going to have to invest in this? At some point, you get a little overwhelmed. You say, this looks enormous. I don't know if I can do this. That's going to be a lot of work. I don't really want to do a lot of work. I just want to smile and jump around and have fun and feel good. Once you understand how these things work, a light bulb goes off. You go,

2:15you know what? I've already learned a little bit more than I thought I did. The things that I learned, these little fragments here, are part of a bigger structure, but they're part of it. I don't have to learn everything. I can take the things that I've already learned, the minor pentatonic pattern one or maybe some chord shapes, and I can start to open up the fretboard using these scales. People ask me, how do I learn to open up the fretboard? I'd say, learn the five pattern scale

2:45system. That's the first step. Once you can do that, we're going to talk about that today, but I'm going to give you three reasons why you're closer to understanding guitar scales than you think. This should be motivational to you. You only need to do a few things to take what you have learned and get something really good from them. The first one is that guitar scales are reusable. Right? We have these patterns that we learned. So I'm going to play, I've been playing an A this week.

3:25So if I learn a scale pattern, I know which note the root is. And if you get a sheet off the internet that teaches you a scale, it doesn't tell you which note is the root. Delete it. The root is the most important part. It's what makes the scale work. If you don't have the root, if you don't know which note is the root, you're missing everything. But this scale is movable, and I can take this scale, slide the same pattern up. Now I'm in a new key. That root note was an A, now it's a B. Same shape, same sounding

4:06scale. It's a major sounding scale. Oh, so the patterns determine whether it's major and minor, not what, where it is on the guitar. Correct. You can be in the same place at the second and third fret and get two different patterns, and one's going to give you one sound and one's going to give you another. Well, if I can play an A, and what Lee's telling me is correct, I can now play in all the

4:36keys. Right. So right away, you learn one pattern. This is why a lot of people get stuck. They learn one pattern, realize they can slide it around, and then they never feel the need to learn anything else. But I'm here to tell you that that's a trap. Making sure you learn the rest of the neck of the guitar, the five pattern system, it gives an identity to what you're playing. Not only can you move it around, other patterns that are related to it move with it. So you, no matter where your hand

5:09is on the guitar, you have every scale and every chord that you need under your fingers. Pattern one isn't because of where it is on the fretboard. It's a physical pattern that doesn't change. And changing how you use that pattern doesn't require changing its identity. This gives you and your fingers something stable, depending on where you are. If you're playing a blues in A, and somebody says,

5:42oh, we're going to do a blues in C, you can take the same licks that you played in A, slide them up from the fifth fret to the eighth fret. And now they're going to work in the new key, right? And so we have the five patterns, and they organize the scale across the fretboard. So now we know that guitar scales are movable, and that we have a system of five that repeats over and over and over again. So when you slide one, all of the rest of them slide with you. Okay, we've got a big foundation now.

6:14But after that, we have to start thinking about, well, what are the different scales that we use? If you listen to popular music, you're going to hear most likely one of four scales, the major, the minor, the major pentatonic, and the minor pentatonic. And really, if you boil them all down, they're all just one scale, just different ways of interpreting those groups of notes. Okay? So when you learn these patterns, you don't have to throw away what you've learned. I teach in coaching, we start in B minor, we do B minor blues, and I have them do all the B minor

6:51patterns, and then the B natural minor. The next week, we do something major. Everyone is very happy to realize that they've already done the work on the first week. When we switch to major, we're just starting on a different note. Okay? So to catch us up to here, we're learning some scales. We've

Connecting major and minor modes

7:13realized that we can move a pattern around to put in different keys. We've realized that there's five patterns across the scale that move with it. So no matter where we are, if we know the root note of that pattern, we know what key we're in, and all the other patterns are in relation to that. Now we have different scales, and different scales come from the same patterns that you've already learned. So if I have pattern one, let's see here. Now if I start this note, if I start with the A,

7:50we get the Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do sound, which is the major sound, which is a happier sound. Now I'm going to start on a different note in this scale pattern. In fact, I'm going to start on the F sharp.

8:06Same notes, same exact notes, but I'm starting at a different note. I'm making that the strong note note. That's called the natural minor scale. So if you've ever played a minor scale, you were using the same patterns as its related major scale. Those differences between the first note that you played, the A root, and then the F sharp minor, this is the distance between the relative major

8:39and relative minor. They're related. They use the same notes, but they start on a different degree of the scale. Now we hear about something very different. It's something called modes. And oh, modes are, they're very scary because they have, you get different sounds and they have very fancy names, Dorian, Ionian, Mixolydian, Locrian, and those things. But the thing is, you're already

9:09playing modes. If you've ever played a minor scale, you're playing a mode. It's called the Aeolian mode, right? Just no one just wants to say that. They just want to call it minor because it's the sadder sound and the major is the half. Those are the two main sounds. That is a certain note in the pattern. But what if I started on, I don't know, let's see, the second degree of the scale. So it was in A. Let's start on a B and go from B to B. That's called the Dorian mode. What if I started on the third

9:45degree of the scale? Let's call it Phrygian. It has a very strange sound because it has a half step above the root.

10:00Not a normal sound that you would hear on the classic rock radio station. Another thing that we can get from our scale patterns is to remove notes. So if we're playing major, and we remove the fourth and the seventh, we get our pentatonic scales.

10:24Pretty easy, right? So you can do that in every pattern. You can have your pentatonic scale patterns across the neck, the same as your major scales. But we can also do the major minor modal kind of thing there. We can start on any of the notes. We typically start on either the six, which is the F sharp in this instance, the minor pentatonic, or the root, the A, which is the major pentatonic.

10:56So you see, it's pretty easy, right? We have these patterns, and we can get major, minor, major pentatonic, and minor pentatonic out of it pretty easily. And it's pretty easy to see in one area. Where it gets difficult is knowing the other patterns. There's five total. So yeah, in the beginning, it's difficult, but it's worth spending the time to get over it. If you think about in school, how many things you've learned, how many things you had to

11:29memorize, that you never used again, that are just taking space up in your brain, and it will never to be used. If you spend a little bit of time, a week or two, going through these five patterns, your guitar playing life changes forever. You start to unlock the fretboard here. This is a system that no matter where your hand is on the guitar, no matter what you want to play, it's underneath your fingers.

12:02So you say, okay, well, that's great. That's major, minor, major pentatonic, minor pentatonic. And then we have Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Locrian, right? So we have all the different sounds across, and I probably missed one. I'm doing this off the top of my head from an outline here. But okay, we've got those sounds, and those come from the scale patterns

Advanced scales and modifying patterns

12:30that we've learned, the five pattern system. But what happens with some of these other scale patterns that you hear people playing? Harmonic minor, diminished, whole tone scales. Those don't come from that. I've seen those patterns. They don't look very good. I mean, they don't look similar to that. Well, we do them in relation to this. So let's talk about harmonic minor. So if I'm

13:00going to play, let's play A minor. It's the same as C major. Same note. Now, harmonic minor does something to that pattern. We change it. We're going to compare to this. So here's my flat seven, and here's my major seven. The major seven sounds like it wants to go up. It has tension to resolve. It's called harmonic minor. I took the seventh and raised it like it's major.

13:42So when I'm playing harmonic minor, I'm not thinking about a harmonic minor scale pattern. I'm thinking about my regular scale patterns, and whenever I hit that one note, the seventh, I make a change. Oh, you mean I don't have to learn a whole neck of new things? No. Take the ones that you already learned and adapt them. My favorite is the diminished scale. So diminished, you'll hear, let's do a G diminished. It's a symmetrical scale, which means it goes half step, whole step,

14:17half step, whole step, or whole step, half step, depending on which way you use it. But when most people, when they learn it, you hear people practicing it like this. It just sounds like a bunch of notes. But if we know our arpeggios, we can do some half steps around those notes and get the same sound. Listen to this.

14:47Can you hear the tension and release? It's the same scale.

14:59It just sounds like nothing. How about this? I hear it over that chord, right? So I took the ideas that I had from my scale patterns, in this instance, from my arpeggios, and I did things to them. So I wasn't having to learn something over and over and over and over again. I'm building on the ideas that I've already spent

15:30time learning. Modes fit into that same framework. New scales become comparison. And this changes what you should put emphasis on in your playing. Instead of learning that one song that you'll probably forget in a few weeks, learn something that you'll use over and over and over again in your guitar playing. So I went on another little journey with you through this. I did the same thing last week in a different way. And I hope you enjoyed it. If you get a chance, go on over to my

16:05blog post about the five pattern system. And I hope you do. And I'll see you soon. Bye-bye, everybody.