Lessons For The Beginners

Herreid Music Newsletter

Lessons for the beginning guitarist

Welcome to the most recent column in this on-going series. So far, we’ve covered many important basic concepts for beginning guitar players. Some of these would include tuning, note names, chords, scales, memorization and coordination.

Now, were going to expand on the subject of scales.

Scales are very useful musical friends which offer us possibilities of different melodies and harmonies. All vocal melodies and musical chords are based on the notes of some type of scale!

Being able to tell which scale you should use for a given situation is very helpful. By applying techniques like vibrato, bending, slides, ect... you can come up with very melodic phrasing.

When learning a scale, you should play it up and down each string and across the finger-board. Changing position on the neck is often accomplished by walking up the notes of a scale to the new position. Let’s take the ‘‘A’’ major scale on the ‘‘G’’ string and show you some possibilities.

There will be little markings to show which technique to use. SL stands for slide, BU for bend up, HO for hammer on, PO for pull off and vibrato or shaking the string is shown by a squiggly line after the note ~~~~. When reading tablature, the line shows which string to play and the number indicates which fret to press down. The numbers inside the notes on the guitar neck show the order of the notes in the ‘‘A’’ major scale with ‘‘A’’ as number one. ‘‘A’’ will be our root because we are in the key of ‘‘A’’ major.

You should practice sliding up and down between all notes of the scale. Sliding between 2 or 3 notes is the easiest. So start there and remember that shaking the string after a slide sounds good.

You should practice bending from one note to the note next to it. You can also release the note so it falls back to its natural position (RB). Be sure you have bent the note to its correct pitch. For general purposes, you should bend with your ring finger and back it up with your middle and index fingers.

To do a hammer-on, play the note with your index finger, then slap down your middle, ring or pinky finger to sound the second note.

To do a pull-off, put two fingers on the notes of the scale you wish to connect. Play the higher note, then pull that finger down off the string. The lower note your other finger is holding will now sound. You may also pull-off against the open string.

Trilling is what happens when you follow a hammer-on with a pull-off. It can be done one time or repeatedly between two or more notes. This technique has been used on many a solo.

Here’s a list of other scales to try the same things with.

Notice that compared to the major scale, some notes have been taken out or lowered. The 2nd, 3rd, 5th, 6th and 7th may all be lowered or flattened. Then a 7th becomes a b7th and so on. Make sure to play two, three and four note phrases with each scale and mix your techniques. This results in much more interesting phrasing.

I guarantee that if you practice and learn everything in this article, your playing will improve ten-fold!

Marvin Allen

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