How to Practice Scales on Lead Guitar

How to Practice Scales on Lead Guitar [Demonstration] Hey everybody its Will Kriski we’re going to talk today about scales. I got a lot of request for scales so I thought I would talk about how to practice them basically there’s a million different scales and it will probably talk about how to apply different scales chords in another lesson but for now we can use the old basic methodology on all sorts of scales. Basically you want to get to know the fret board inside and out learned your scale and all the positions going horizontally across the neck your triads, intervals. Lots of different ways of practicing scales and learning them you want to mix it up, sequence is another way so if we take the C major scale to start with I’ve got no sharps and flats so it’s just CDEFGABC again and if we start in the, we want to, there’s basically multiple positions and you want to start with the open position stay in that area, work your way up the fret board for starters so for example C major scale we want to be of the lowest possible note in that scale. Into the highest point in that position so basically we’re going from the E the lowest string up to the G. That’s basically the range you want stay within the first three frets. So if we just practice it and I would suggest use metronome to keep and kind of track your progress but we’ll just show you how you do it. [Demonstration] Okay, so you would play those 8th notes and you would basically build up your speed and you want to make sure your alternate picking and you know you play them cleanly. You don’t have to use distortion if you want but you know make sure every note can be heard clearly. I’m going to show these on my website as well so you can look at the music that sheet music for that. For the first position we would move up till we would start on the F and we would get up to the A on a 5th Fret. Okay and you would do the same thing moving all the way up to different positions so then that will take a little while to get to know how to play them up and down. You get to know those positions. Then what you want to try to do with each position you could work on a sequence so that would mean a repeating idea so for example if I play a note and I skip note and I go to the next one so I’m going up in thirds will be like this. [Demonstration] Then you go down. [Demonstration] And you could try a different sequences and you basically want to mix them up you go third just like that, you could go 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th if you want. Try all lots of different intervals and show some of those on my website as well. The other thing you want do typically is go horizontally across the neck so that could be one string or you know two strings or more if you wanted to. So if we want to go horizontally click off the hi Eastern. We have to know the notes basically but there’s no sharps or flat so it would be E. [Demonstration] And you want to keep going, now I’m going to leave my finger all the way up it’s not something you would probably want to do when you’re playing normally but the other thing you could do is say two strings and you’re going to want to go down on that one as well so… [Demonstration] And you do that on all two string comparison to what you did on the G&B. The D and G string the A&B and E&F so you could do that up and down. That will be really good for you to get to know the scales. If you notice when I was playing you know I was all over the fret board so another thing you want to do is when you have you know say two positions that are adjacent to each other fairly well memorizing that. You can basically connect the two together so if your starting in the middle and you start to go…. [Demonstration] So you’re kind of moving back and forth between the two positions and you do that all the way up and down the neck. What I used to do is turn out all the notes on the whole fret board and I start to see certain patterns. I mean they can be helpful sometimes when you know especially for speed and things like that. You want to know what notes are playing and make sure they sound good over the chords but for example on the C major you’ll notice there’s a— if you want to use triple pattern you basically go GABCDE so we can go… [Demonstration] So you can do that, you can try so you can basically slide her up so that’s quite a bit there that you can absorb and you know work on your skills that way and you know you can apply those I can’t say to any scale to learn that up and down the fret board. It just gives you the freedom to move all over the place so I hope you can work with that and we’ll see you on my next left and see you guys.