Why Learn Guitar Scales?

How Learning Scales On The Guitar Can Make You A Better Guitar Player

One very basic reason is that practicing guitar scales helps to improve finger strength and co-ordination and your overall technique. Learning guitar scales will also improve your playing speed and help you to improvise and play riffs and solos. Many guitar solos you hear are formed from them.


If you just want to be a rhythm guitarist in a group playing covers of other group’s songs, you probably don’t need to bother with scales. Even if you’re the lead guitarist in the same band, you might get by without learning scales, just learn the songs from tabs.

If you know your scales, when you perform with a group of musicians, and they tell you the song is played in a particular key, you'll know which notes to play and be able to jam along with them.

If you understand just the standard major and minor scales, you can understand how to form chords, produce melodies, and harmony parts, as well as lead parts and solos, and not hit a note that sounds out of tune. Here's one tip, there's no difference between the major scale and the minor scale, they just start at a different position on the neck of the guitar.

A lot of people just starting to learn guitar want to learn rock guitar. The main scale for this is the minor pentatonic scale. Again, the major pentatonic scale is exactly the same but is just played in a different position.

You will find that guitarists that haven’t learnt scales, actually play scales but just don’t realise it. They have picked them up from learning songs. If they had made the decision to learn them, their knowledge and ability would have been so much better.