Mickylee - jazz guitar expert

6 Ways to Play Scales on the Guitar

Learn the basics of scales on the guitar

In this video, Mickylee shows you how to approach scales on your guitar... the easy way!

Released on April 7, 2021

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Video Transcription

Hi, my name is Mickylee and in this video, I want to show you a couple of ways how to play Scales on Guitar. So, let's start right away. The first thing I want to show you is how to play the Scales in one position. So, you could take any position, I'm going to take the second. So, I placed my first finger on the Second Fret, and then I'm going to play G major scale, starting from G, on the low E string and going all the way up and then down.

You can find all the notes of any given scale in all the positions and you can do the same. The second thing I want to talk about is, three notes per string, where you basically play three notes of a scale on any given string. So, let's start in this position. We stay with G and for the way back, you can move one note and then go and then do this.

You can also find all the notes across the neck and do the same. The next thing would be four notes per string, where you have four notes. Now, this is a little bit trickier on guitar and fingering is not that easy, but what I'm going to show you two ways, how you can do it. First way would be to do basically, three notes per string, and then just always move one finger for the fourth note, which would be, ascending, probably the pinky and descending, it would be the first finger. Let's do it like this, G major and when I go back, I do this.

I could also use all four fingers, but that's not that easy. It goes something like this and back.

The next thing you could do is you could play the Scale on one string only. So, let's take E one and play G major. I started with the G and do this.

I could also do the same on every string. Let's take, maybe this string. This time, I'm going to play G major scale, but I'm going to start a note D which would technically be the Mixolydian.

You don't always have to play Scales in the same order, like one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. You can mix up the numbers. I'm going to give you a couple of ideas. You can play the intervals. So, basically when we do one, two, three, four, and so on, we play in seconds, we could play in thirds, which you probably already know. It sounds like this. But what about fourths? You could do that as well. How about fifths?

You could play the Scale notes in random order and also in random Octaves. So, this is a lot of fun. Let me try G major again and I'll do whatever. Let me try descending. So, that will be all from me for now. Thank you very much for watching. I hope you had fun and you learned something. See you in the next video. Bye.
Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com
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