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"Guitar Practice Scales: Highly Effective Exercises For Learning How To Play Guitar Scales"

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Use these guitar practice scales for mastering the major scale on guitar, strengthening your fingers, and gaining muscle memory for playing scales fast.

How to play guitar scales

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When you practice guitar scales, the most important thing is learning what fingers to use. Each finger has its own place. Using the wrong finger makes the exercise far less effective.

Following some simple rules makes things a lot easier. When a guitar scale such as the ones we will use in these exercises only spans the distance of no more than four frets, you designate one finger to each fret respectively.

Our guitar practice scales are all based on the G major scale, which only uses frets 2, 3, 4, and 5 in our position.

Therefore, you should line up your fingers so that they match those exact frets:

Index is to be used for fret 2

Middle for fret 3

Ring for fret 4

And pinky for fret 5

Ooga Booga says:

"Follow this rule entirely throughout every single note you play through in our upcoming exercises. Deviating from your "locked in" finger positions will make these guitar practice scales almost worthless. Not entirely worthless, but almost ;)"

Using our assigned finger positions does present a challenge though. What if you have two of the same frets in a row, but on separate strings? You don't want to lift your finger up entirely, that would slow you down...

What you do want to do is perform a "finger roll" from one string to the next. All you have to do is flatten out your finger slightly so that it covers both strings. Easy!

Now let's check out the exercises, all based on the major scale.

Guitar practice scales -- Exercises for developing strength and speed

Here are some tips for making these exercises more effective:

• Use strength-building guitar finger exercises to get stamina
• Play along to a metronome, gradually increasing your speed
• Use alternate picking for speed and accuracy

The G major scale

Here is the scale straight from front to back, no trickery involved...

Click tablature to enlarge:

The G major scale in rows of 3

Now, let's perform the scale playing three notes at a time, gradually building upon the scale...

Click tablature to enlarge:

The G major scale in rows of 4

Much like the previous example in rows of three, we will now do the scale in groups of four notes at a time...

Click tablature to enlarge:

The G major scale in thirds

If you know a little music theory, you probably know about intervals. Intervals describe how far apart notes are in music. But we aren't talking about theory here, just practicing grueling scale exercises!

Click tablature to enlarge:

The G major scale in fourths

Now try it in "fourths." This one is made up of almost all finger rolls, so flatten out those fingers!

Click tablature to enlarge:

The G major scale in fifths

And finally, play the G major scale in "fifths." You should notice some power chord shapes here and there.

Click tablature to enlarge:

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