To learn scales or not to learn scales

For many learning guitarists scales are the scariest thing in the world. They will continually put them off for weeks and months hoping they will go away. Many people will gain the philosophy that if they get to know the guitar well enough then scales wont be needed, or if they learn enough solos by other people they will automatically know what to do when soloing themselves. But the truth is that it is virtually impossible, and learning scales would be a lot quicker.


I am aiming this post mainly at lead guitarists, but I personally feel rhythm guitars should learn some scales to.


'In music, a scale is a group of musical notes collected in ascending and descending order, that provides material for or is used to conveniently represent part or all of a musical work including melody and/or harmony.'


Scales will help tell you which notes work in each key, or what notes you can use over each chord, or just help you better understand the fretboard.


When improvising, scales are very useful as they give you a guide line to what notes you can play in each key. So if your improvising over an A minor blues progression, you can improvise over it using the notes from the A minor pentatonic scale and just let the music flow with ease.


Having good scale knowledge will make your note choices much better as you will know exactly what notes go together well, and what notes fit into a certain key.


It will also help you out when learning other peoples work as those long scales runs suddenly change from being a big bunch of numbers on a tab to a harmonic minor run, or C major, or which ever scale the guitarist has used. Suddenly you will understand what the guitarist was doing when creating the solo and you will be able to learn it and master it much quicker.




This is just the tip of the ice berg in terms of what learning scales and having a good scale vocabulary can do for you.


The more knowledge you have, the more freedom you can gain.


Having good technique is one thing, but if you know what notes to play with it, you are in heaven.