This is part of an ongoing series of posts documenting my current guitar student’s private lessons. Obviously, the strength of private study is that each lesson is customized to your needs and goals. But there’s likely something useful here for beginner guitarists who don’t have access to a teacher. As usual, the tab/notation and audio examples were created with Guitar Pro, which I’ve used for years and recommend. If you follow that link and buy a copy, it helps support the site.
In our fourth lesson, I introduced the Am Pentatonic Scale. Here’s Pattern 1 of that scale, as a fretboard diagram:
Adding the flat 5 turns the Minor Pentatonic Scale into the Blue Scale:
We spent our session working on playing these scales up and down, across the neck.
Then I introduced the concept of playing random notes from these scales, to improvise melodies. This was challenging at first, but my student seemed to really enjoy playing the scale patterns. Because playing these at the fifth fret was proving challenging, we moved them up to the 12th fret, where the frets are closer (in real life, though not in the diagrams). This changed them from Am scales to Em scales and gave me a chance to talk about moveable forms.
Realizing he’d benefit from some licks that fit these scales. So I wrote out five simple-but useful ones in E Minor, and these formed the bulk of our fifth lesson. The sharp-eyed among you will notice that I had to introduce hammer-ons, pull-offs, and vibrato, though these can all be played without those articulations. They’ll be less fun, of course:
Here’s Guitar Pro‘s rendition of what those sound like, if you were to play them straight through. Each ends on a half note. You can use that to mark the end of one and the beginning of the next:
Summing Up
Moving from chords to scales is a big deal, I think. I could have started with scales. But, on the guitar, being able to play something right out of the gate is important. Power chords are super easy and sound like rock-n-roll. They’re an easy win, so I start with them. But I’m always eager to bring scales into the mix. Now we have some fundamentals of melody to go along with our fundamentals of harmony and rhythm. The essential components are coming together.
Credits
The PDF with notation and tab examples and the MP3 were created, as I mentioned, with Guitar Pro. The fretboard diagrams were created with an HTML/CSS/JS contraption I’m working on. The working title of it is “scalesjs.” It uses the HTML Canvas element and a bunch of JavaScript to draw whatever diagram I like. In the past, I’ve created such things with graphics editors. But I wanted something more flexible. I’ll likely talk more about it in other articles. The licks in the examples are my own. I like writing licks. The challenge with these was to keep them simple but cool.