5 Tips To Get the Best out of Practicing Scales and Impact your Guitar Playing

5 Tips To Get the Best out of Practicing Scales and Impact your Guitar Playing

Have you ever learned a new scale on a guitar, practiced for a few days and then got bored and wanted to learn a new scale to play? If you said yes, your situation is not at all unique. Everyone avoids practicing scales as much as possible. Even though we know it is good for us, we aren’t exactly sure why.

So why are scales worth our time?

Here are 2 articles that shed some light on how practicing scales impact Guitar playing 

Article 1: 5 Things You’d Know Better If You Practice Your Scales on Guitar, Mike Phillipov on Ultimate Guitar

Most guitarists don’t know what to do with new scales they learn on the guitar and assume that they are done learning a new scale after memorizing notes and briefly playing it on their instrument. Such an approach places severe (and unnecessary) restrictions on your musical creativity by limiting the ways in which you can actually use any new scale that you learn in your guitar solos.

Fortunately, there is a better way to practice guitar that will help you to get more out of the time you spend learning scales. The most important thing you must keep in mind is the need to explore all the creative possibilities any new scale has to offer before you abandon it in search of the next scale to practice. When you get yourself to do this, you will amaze yourself by how much more fun you will have when practicing and how many more creative ideas you will be able to derive from any scale you are working with.

http://bit.ly/PracticeGuitarScales 

Article 2: Why I’d be A Lot More Diligent About Practicing Scales If I Could Do It All Over Again 

Scales aren’t just about putting in the time. They are a testing ground. An ideal laboratory or controlled environment for developing the fundamental building blocks of our technique. Smooth shifts, Speed, Contact point, distribution. Quality and concept of sound. Whether it’s experimenting with finger pressure, it’s less about playing the scale perfectly, and more about exploration, hypothesis testing, and building up a toolbox of fundamental skills that we can then apply to whatever unique combination of demands we might encounter in our repertoire.

It’s an opportunity to strip away the dozens of other variables we would otherwise encounter in a piece of music, and focus on mastering just one aspect of our technique in isolation. Then adding in the others, one at a time, to see how that changes things. So that we can tweak and experiment with the little tiny details and truly master the fundamentals.

Are fundamentals boring? At first glance maybe, but is it possible to be truly great without a solid grasp of the fundamentals? 

Action Points

1. Don’t Learn Scales at Random, Be Specific About Your Needs
2. Break Out of “Box Patterns” and Learn each Scale Across the Guitar Fretboard
3. Analyze Scales Used in Your Favorite Guitar Solos and How They Are Used
4. Practice Playing Scales on Each String rather than Only Using the Scale Shapes
5. CAGED System – Avoid or Ignore it

There are several ways to progress when learning scales on the guitar and some of these are far more effective than others. Observe your rate of progress to determine which methods are more appropriate to your needs as a guitarist. Apply the tips given in this blog and see the incredible results from the way you used to learn until now.

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Sources:

https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/lessons/scales/5_things_youd_better_know_if_you_practice_scales_on_guitar.html

http://www.guitarnoise.com/lessons/get-more-from-scales-practice/

http://truefire.com/blog/guitar-lessons/15-reasons-why-practicing-guitar-scales-is-great-for-more-than-just-memorizing-notes/

http://www.bulletproofmusician.com/why-id-be-a-lot-more-diligent-about-practicing-scales-if-i-could-do-it-all-over-again/