How To Learn Any Guitar Scale In FIVE MINUTES!
How long does it take to learn a new scale on the guitar?
Many people would immediately think that it takes quite a while. At least a week or two, maybe more if you want to play a solo.
And in some capacity those people would be right. The guitar can be a pretty confusing instrument when it comes to learning scales, for a lot of reasons.
To make matters worse, look at an instrument like the piano. Think about how simple learning a new scale must be.
Learn the notes,
find them in one octave,
...and that’s it.
The octaves repeat left-to-right on the piano keyboard, and every octave looks the same. So once you learn a single position, you know the entire scale across the entire piano. Boom!
Wouldn’t that be nice if the guitar was like that? (wink wink nudge nudge...)
...
Well guess what? The guitar is exactly like that.
Yes, it can be that simple on our instrument too. And i'll show you how
You just have to let go of one simple assumption that most guitar players have... for some strange reason. You have to let go of the idea of learning all the shapes of a scale.
Instead, you are going to learn one minimal shape... and move it around the fretboard.
(No, this is not "one weird trick guitar teacher hates" clickbait. This is how the instrument was supposed to work to begin with before we made a mess of guitar pedagogy... but I digress)
With what I show you in this video you can learn a completely-brand-new-to-you scale. (yes, any scale, from Dorian to Superlocrian to Hungarian minor...) in 5 minutes or less, and be able to use it well enough to play a decent solo.
Now, even after learning a scale like this, we still have the rest of the fretboard to cover, and it's learning the scale across the entire fretboard that really lets you use it fluently.
If you want to truly master as many scales and modes as you can fit into your brain, I recommend you check out my Master of the Modes guitar course.
Video Transcription
Hello internet, so nice to see you! Often, as guitar players, we are called to learn new stuff in real time to play music. So, one of the things that happens pretty often for lead players is that we have to learn a new scale that we never played before, just for a specific song or a specific situation.
Well, how can we learn a new scale really, really fast, well enough to play a lead, to play a solo on it? I'm going to show you right now a system to learn any new scale that you've never played before in five minutes, well enough that you can play a lead on it.
Of course, I'm going to show this with a couple of examples. It could be that you already know those two examples, it could be already know those two scales I'm showing, that's okay, the very same system will apply to any other scale.
The first example I'm going to show, it's fairly simple, so it's easy to understand what I'm doing, and the second example, it's fairly more complex, so you can see that this system holds up even in a more complex situation, even if the scale is more complex or stranger, okay?
So, without further ado, let's go and see how do we do it. Let's say my first example is going to be a Hirajoshi scale. Let's say you never played a Hirajoshi scale before, and by the way, Hirajoshi can be more than one scale depending on who you ask, so I'm going to write down exactly what I mean, okay?
So the first thing will be, the first step in all these will be to spell out your scale, so step number one, spell the scale out. There we go. And in this case, I'm going to spell the A Hirajoshi and my A Hirajoshi, or at least this scale I want to play right now, it's going to be A, B flat, D, E, and F.
Okay, I'm going to learn, but I already know it, maybe you don't, or maybe you do, but... I'm going to show you how you can learn this scale or an equivalent in less than five minutes, good enough, to solo.
Step number two will be to play the scale on the low strings of your guitar. Specifically the lower two strings. We're going to need to put down this scale on a two string pattern, okay? If I am looking only at the low two strings of the guitar, I can play the A.
Whoops, there we go. I can play the A on the sixth string fifth fret, the B flat on the sixth string sixth fret, the D here on the fifth string fifth fret, the E fifth string seven fifth fret. and the F on the 5th string, 8th fret, so if I were to do a tablature only for the last two strings, those are the last two strings of your guitar, there are other strings on top, okay, I will write down 5,
6, 5, 7, 8, so this would be this scale here, played on the low two strings of your guitar, okay, that is the scale. Step number three would be to move up in octaves, what does that mean? Well now I have to delete all these and show you how we move up in octaves and it works this way, so let's now see all the six strings of the guitar, okay, so if I have all the six strings of the guitar and I just played my scale on the low two strings of the guitar,
there we go, okay, and again it was 5, 6, 5, 7, 8, this is one octave of my scale. Now I'm gonna play these on the next two strings, one octave higher, to do that I just need to use the exact same numbers but add two to every number and to move it up on these new string sets, so I'm gonna have to add two frets, so 5 becomes 7, 6 becomes 8, 5 becomes 7, 7 becomes 9, 8 becomes 10.
To move it up on the The next group of two strings I need now to add three. That's for these two here and three here, it depends on how the guitar is tuned. Again, this works in standard tuning, meaning that if I play the same thing two frets higher here and then three frets higher here, I can play the same thing, the same notes.
So to go up here, I need to grab the numbers I have here now and add three. So seven becomes 10, eight becomes 11. I'm going to go out of the whiteboard in a second, but then I'm going to have 10, 12, 13.
I'm probably out at this point of the whiteboard. Now what limit are these? Moving the camera? Yeah, bounce move. There we go, 10, 12, 13. So now I can play this scale. Throughout all the guitar. Okay.
And I've learned only one shape, because the shape here is the same as the shape here, which is the same as the shape here. And it's really easy in few minutes to learn just a two-string shape and learning how to move it.
Okay. So just by moving up and down this two-string shape, I can play this scale convincingly for one lead, for one solo, because I just learned one shape. Now, is this the end-all be-all? No, that's just one shape.
You do not know all the shape of this scale. You do not know all the possibility of this scale. But here's the thing. In five minutes, you learn one, and that's enough to play a lead on that scale. That's the point.
It's a quick and dirty solution to learn something right now when you need it. Now, can I do this with more complex scales? Of course I can. And it's going to work this way. Let me take a more complex scale.
I mean, this scale had only five notes, no? So, what if we get a scale with more notes, like seven notes? And what if we take a scale that is less common, so I'm not going to pick a usual mode or something else?
I can take, I don't know, the A Hungarian minor. A Hungarian minor. It's a fantastic sound scale, and it's A, B, C, D-sharp, E, F, G-sharp. If I had to learn all the shape of this scale, then I can do it.
of these, it's gonna take a while. And if I had to learn all the possibility of these, it's gonna take a while. So, how we do it? We do it the exact same thing. First, we spell it, we just did it. And then we're gonna write these on the bottom two strings of our guitar.
So now, let me delete these. Let me redo the tablature here, okay. With my fairly unsteady hands, I'm gonna make those wobbly lines that are meant to represent the strings of your guitar. Okay, there we go.
And I'm gonna write this scale down here on the first two strings of your guitar. The first group is those two strings here. And now, this scale has seven notes, so I love to divide those notes one way or another between the two strings.
But the point is, it doesn't matter how I do it, because as long as I can play these on two strings, then I can replicate the same thing on the next two strings and the next two strings. So I'm gonna put it down this way, I'm gonna do A on 5, B on 7, C on 8, I'm gonna put D sharp here on 11, okay, and you see why immediately, because now I have E, E, 7, F, and G sharp, and so I have 7, 8, 7, 8, 7,
8, 11, 7, 8, 11, which is nice, because it makes it easier for me to learn, okay? Now, I have this, and I just need to replicate the same thing, 2 frets higher for the next group of 2 strings, and then 3 frets higher, so plus 2 here, yeah, of course, and you cannot see plus 2, because now I'm out of the plus 2 to go down here, and plus 3 to go here.
So, let me add to all those numbers, and go on the next 2 strings, I have 7, 9, 10, 13, 9, 10, 13, and then let me add 3 to everything, so I have 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, and then I'm gonna have, I'm gonna go and just write it here, 12, 13, 16, okay?
So, I have this shape here, this shape here, and this shape here. How does that look in practice? It looks, no, it looks this way, I'm gonna play the 5 with my index finger, I'm gonna slide up, play the 7 again with my index finger, the 8 with my middle, the pinky stretches up to the 11, and then the same 7, 8, 11, so.
And now, I'm moving this like I do. Let me see if I can have the camera look at the whole sample now. That's the idea. Very easily this way I've been able to set down this scale in a shape on two strings and moving the shape up in octaves in the other strings.
And then now you have one position for this scale. This is, as I say, good enough to fake it. Okay, so it's a scale you didn't know. I mean, again, you may already know the A Hungarian minor. Maybe you know all the position of the A hungarian minor.
Great, do this with another scale you don't know, not a problem. But you can take a scale that you don't know, of which you know just the notes. Okay, literally just open up any catalog of scales and grab a random scale, just have the notes, put it down on a two-string shape, multiply this two-string shape in different octaves, now you can play.
This scale, convincingly enough to fake it, okay? In that one position, only sure, but that's enough to play one lead. Now, if you want to know more how to play all the other scales, okay? Or how to visualize properly scales and modes on your guitar.
So you don't know just one position to fake it, but you know all the position. And you don't have to fake it, because you just know the whole thing. With one to become essentially a master of the modes, what a coincidence, I have a course called exactly master of the modes.
There we go. You take this course and you learn to visualize all scales and modes, especially the standard modes. We start from the standard modes, but then we go to all the other scales. And you learn to see them all throughout the fretboard in all the shape and navigate freely.
So not just one position to fake it, but all the position and how to use them. And then you learn also on what chords they work, how to improvise with that, how to change key with modes, how to use those modes in actual real playing situation.
If you're interested in that, if you are a lead player, you totally want to have a look at master of the modes. This is Tommaso Zillio for musictheoryforguitar.com, and until next time, enjoy!