In this lesson we’re going to look at the application of the major scale by learning the Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door guitar solo by Slash of Guns N’ Roses.

Pentatonic scale extensions open up the door to a variety of new uses for the scale and expands your knowledge of the scale up and down the fretboard.

Arpeggios are a great tool to use when soloing over chord changes or adding fills to rhythm sections. However, when and how to apply them can be a little confusing.

One of the easiest ways to learn your way around the fretboard is by applying licks to each scale position. You take something you already know how to play and apply it to the different positions on the fretboard.

When we first learn the pentatonic scales, it’s typically done position by position. We learn one pattern, then the next, and so on. There’s nothing wrong with this approach, but if we don’t expand on it we’re bound to feel trapped in the “box”.

Playing chord progressions by position is a great way to familiarize yourself with the different chord voicings found all over the neck. It helps open up the fretboard and reduces dependency on only playing open chords and basic barre chord shapes.

In the lesson Navigating Major Scale Positions on Guitar by Using the Root Note, we learned how to use the root note of the major scale as an anchor point to move between scale positions on the guitar. In this lesson, we take a look at the root note patterns of the minor scale positions.

One of the challenges we face as guitar players wanting to incorporate leads into our playing is being able to move between scale positions. We learn all of the patterns, but typically rely on one or two boxes for our leads.

One of the more challenging obstacles as a beginner guitarist, or if you’re just new to guitar theory, is figuring out how to determine the key of a song. Some songs stick to standard chords within a key, which makes this task much easier. Other songs, however, are not as straight forward.