Guitar Lesson – Lead Guitar Traps & How to Avoid Them

By Mike P Hayes

Scales can free your fingers and freeze your brain. Practicing scales hour after hour can actually harm your progress on the guitar.

How many lead guitar books have you bought that are absolutely chock full of scales? It’s easy to get overwhelmed by this avalanche of information, the fact that there are thousands of scales that have to be learnt in twelve different keys and played over the entire fingerboard is enough to scare off all but the very determined guitarist.

In fact, in many instances when confronted by this seemingly impossible task of playing lead guitar the unfortunate result is the player giving up in frustration, I say unfortunate because it certainly doesn’t have to be that way.

Here’s a few concepts and attitudes about scales that will help you ‘pin your ears on straight’ and save you countless hours of frustrating, counterproductive practice.

Fact 1: You don’t have to learn all the scales – now isn’t that a relief straight away, most guitar instructional material would have you believe that you would be a second rate guitarist unless you knew every scale backwards (and forwards).

Nothing could be further from the truth! Playing music has absolutely nothing to do with learning hundreds of scales and playing them as fast as you possibly can all over the guitar like a “bee in a bottle”.

How many scales you need to learn will depend on the style(s) of music you want to play, but in any case you will only be looking at a very small number of scales, usually between six and ten maximum.

You should however, learn your scales thoroughly in each of the twelve keys.

Fact 2: Scales alone are not music – scales are nothing more than
a musical alphabet. To use this analogy of music scales and spoken language … it therefore stands to reason that simply reciting an alphabet (regardless of how fast you could recite it), would not communicate anything!

Scales can become music when carefully woven into the musical soundscape by an experienced musician.

The reason why musicians learn different scales is to help them express themselves better in a variety of musical settings, it also help make their music more interesting by adding variety to their music.

The important distinction is to make certain you are learning the scales that are relevant to your music.

Fact 3: Playing scales fast will not help you improve your ‘ear’.

If you have ever watched any of the thousands of lead guitar videos where the guitarist plays scales at warp speed setting the fretboard alight with his or her facile fingers display you will know apart from it being very entertaining that …

(a) it was a great chance for the guitarist to “show off”,

(b) it didn’t communicate anything … it was just a random phrase and

(c) you most likely did not learn anything apart from the fact that you don’t want to hear it again.

When you play a scale fast you only hear the first and last notes which incidentally happen to be the same note only an octave apart.

Because you are passing over the rest of the notes in the scale so fast your ear does not get a chance to listen to how each individual note sounds in relation to the previous sounds, the notes simply ‘blur’ together.

Playing meaningful music is about constantly making choices and reacting to the sounds around you, it has nothing to do with “showing off” and playing random phrases as fast as possible.

To summarize : Select the relevant scales for your style(s) of music, learn to play these scales in all the twelve keys, and learn the art of playing your scales slowly. These tips will accelerate your lead guitar playing and will help you escape the dreaded lead guitar traps.

Mike Hayes develops systems and products to help you succeed in your guitar playing. Find out more about how to learn guitar fast with his popular free ecourse, available at:
=> http://www.guitarcoaching.com

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