Guitar lessons for beginners and more

Major Guitar Scales Lesson: Bb Major Scale Positions

Right now, we’re on a journey towards mastering the guitar fretboard. The goal is to learn all twelve major keys in all five scale positions across the fretboard. So far, we’ve covered C major, F major, and G major.

Each of these guitar scale lessons build on the previous week, so if you haven’t checked those out then you want to start with learning your C major scales.

This week we’re going to look at Bb major.

Major Guitar Scales Lesson: G Major Scale Positions

The past couple weeks we learned our C major scale in all five scale positions up and down the fretboard. This enabled us to also learn the F major scale in all five scale positions, because all we had to do was change the “B” notes in the C major scale to “Bb” notes for [...]

Major Guitar Scales Lesson: F Major Scale Positions

For the next several weeks, we will be learning our major scales up and down the fretboard in all five positions and in all twelve major keys. Seem like an impossible task? Don’t worry. It’s not so bad, but in case you missed it, you will most definitely want to take a look at the introduction to the major guitar scales method we’re using to do this, and you might want to read up on the music theory for major scales.

The beauty about learning our major guitar scales with this method is that it not only teaches us the scale patterns but it inevitably teaches us the theory behind each major scale and the individual notes of each scales and how they interact and relate to one another. If we know how the notes interact with one another on the fretboard, we can begin to start crafting some interesting melodies and solos.

This week we are going to learn the F major scale.

Guitar Scales for Beginners 101

Learning guitar scales is one of the best ways to start learning how to solo and improvise over the guitar fretboard. In this guitar lesson, we will not only learn two guitar scales: major and pentatonic, but we’ll also learn when to use these scales and when not to use them.

Major Guitar Scale

In a previous lesson, we learned the theory behind a major scale. We learned exactly what makes a major scale a major scale and how to build a major scale from any starting note. For this lesson, let’s look at the C major scale on the guitar fretboard. [...]

Guitar Games Review: Learn Guitar & Fight Space Monsters

Lately, we’ve had some great lessons about guitar scales, learning the fretboard, and theory. If we’re really honest though, this stuff isn’t always very fun to digest. However, unbeknownst to me until just lately, there is a fun way to put all of this material into practice.

Just recently, I received an email from William Wilson, a classical guitarist from San Diego. William has put together a very fun and interactive resource created to help you learn the guitar fretboard, guitar scales, and theory called Guitar Games. I asked William if he would let me try it out and write up a review, and he gave me the okay.

Guitar Games Features
The goal of Guitar Games is to help you learn the guitar fretboard, guitar scales, theory, and how to read music. They’ve created a variety of interactive and fun games to help you learn all of this information that can often times be very boring.

I was pretty skeptical when I first received William’s email. I was honestly expecting the games to be cheesy and not very helpful. How can you possible make theory and learning the fretboard fun? It seems like a paradox.

However, I was pretty surprised once I took a look. [...]

Guitar Lessons: Scales & Learning the Guitar Fretboard

It’s true that knowing guitar scales and learning the guitar fretboard is invaluable for taking your playing to the next level. A knowledge and understanding of your instrument opens up a wide variety of creative possibilities (e.g. soloing, improvising, etc.) for how you actually play your instrument.

In the past, we’ve explained the theory behind guitar scales and we’ve also took a more in depth look at how to build a major scale. This information is essential to your growth, but we’ve never really had any guitar lessons that look at the ways you can actually learn guitar scales and learn the guitar fretboard.

In this guitar lesson on scales, let’s look at a three ways you can learn guitar scales and learn the guitar fretboard [...]

Guitar Scale Anatomy: the Theory Behind a Major Scale

Note: This is Part 2 of “Guitar Scale Anatomy.” Guitar Scale Anatomy: Part 1 can be found here.

In Part 1 of Guitar Scale Anatomy, we started to look at how guitar scales function, so we can have a better understanding of how these scales relate to the songs we play. We provided a working definition of a scale and looked at how half steps and whole steps between notes contribute to the formation of a scale.

As you can recall, the way the half steps and whole steps are arranged between notes in a scale are one of the ways that give the scale a particular quality such as major or minor.

For this part, I’m going to reference back to our previous examples in which I gave you two “E” scales. While both were “E” scales, one was an “E” major scale and the other was [...]

Guitar Scale Anatomy: Theory Explained Behind Guitar Scales

In this lesson, we look at how the notes of a guitar scale interact and relate with one another. When I first started playing guitar, it was suggested that I learn guitar scales up and down the guitar neck so I could learn the guitar fretboard. However, learning patterns will only get you so far. You need to know how the notes function in a guitar scale so you know how to use them to improvise and crafts solos and lead lines. [...]