I put together a site to help guitarists learn their scales from fretboard diagrams–like the ones I used when I was learning bass and guitar. I’m calling it Wheat’s Guitar Scales. It’s free, and I think it’s quite good. It’s exactly the sort of thing I would have enjoyed having when I was coming up.
I cover the scales in the order I think is best for learning them. And “best,” in this case, means moving from simple-but-useful to more complicated by simple degrees. So, I start with the A Minor Pentatonic Scale because it’s just five notes but is the backbone of blues and a lot of blues-inspired rock. Then I move the the A Minor Blues Scale which, though it adds only one note to the A Minor Pentatonic Scale, opens up a whole world of blues and blues-inspired rock sounds. This first sequence ends with the A Natural Minor Scale, which most people find a lot more challenging because it demands that you use all four fingers of your left/fretting hand. The Natural Minor Scale has a darker. Metal guitarists lean on it a lot, and it also crops up in a lot of classical guitar music.
I’m going to expand this thing in two directions. First, I’ll be adding more scales and walking through their patterns. The major scales are missing entirely from this first batch. But I’ll be bringing them along next: Major Pentatonic, Major Blues, and the Major Scale. I’ll demonstrate these foundational major scales as I’ve done the foundational minor scales.
Once those are in place, I’ll add a reference for how these scales are laid out in the other keys, but I’ll just include the entire scale and label the patterns, rather than stepping through each position. Once you know the patterns, applying them to another key is easy, but having a full-neck reference is useful for practicing and for finding useful lines, especially those involving open strings.
That covers breadth. The other direction will be depth. To deepen the understanding of each pattern of each scale, I’ll be including a few licks for each. I intend to tab these out in GuitarPro so I can include them as standard notation + tab. And I’ll likely include an audio file of them as well. I might include videos for these as well. I’m not sure. Video makes everything more complicated. But I think, pedagogically, it would be helpful.
So, that’s a brief tour of the thing itself and some notes on the road ahead.