Tag Archives: major scale

I always enjoy exercises that are more encompassing than just learning a single skill. In this lesson, we’re going to harmonize the G major scale in first position to understand the chords and intervals of the key as a single system. This reinforces four essential skills at once: scale position identity, interval recognition, root note awareness, and diatonic harmony.

If you’re familiar with the CAGED system, then you know it’s a way to use open chord shapes to map out guitar chords all over the fretboard. But the system goes far beyond just chords to incorporate arpeggios, pentatonic scales, and diatonic scales. In this lesson we’re going to look at an exercise that that […]

In this lesson we’re going to dive into some guitar exercises for the 3-notes per string major scale. These exercises will help you learn the scale patterns and improve your ability to play them fluently. They’ll also expose you to some common note patterns that can be applied to guitar solos and other scale exercises.

In this lesson we’re going to use a harmonization exercise to help you learn your 7th chords. This exercise will expose you to several chord forms for major, minor, and half-diminished 7th chords. Also, it provides plenty of repetition to help get the chords embedded into your muscle memory.

One of the most useful skills when it comes to navigating the guitar fretboard is to be able to identify a pentatonic scale pattern from a single root note anywhere on the fretboard. This will allow you to not only play around any given position on the fretboard, but also be able to move seamlessly between positions and scale patterns.

I love to work from arpeggios when improvising and creating musical lines. It’s so easy to create a melody with them and they can be easily expanded upon with scales. In this lesson we’re going to work through a simple musical exercise for applying arpeggios and scales to the guitar.

On the guitar there are a number of techniques that are fundamental to playing the instrument. Slides are one of those techniques. While it’s a basic technique, there’s nuance to getting it clean and crisp as you move between notes. In this lesson we cover some basic guitar sliding exercises that will level up your technique.

Mixolydian, along with Dorian, is one of my favorite modes to improvise over. It’s rather straightforward and gives you room to experiment and intermix several approaches. In this lesson we’re going to take a look at a three simple options for improvising a guitar solo in the Mixolydian mode.

The pentatonic scale, by far, has to be the most widely used guitar scale. Its versatility and playability is unmatched. In this lesson, we take an overall view of the pentatonic scale, how it’s formed, the two most common pentatonic scales used in music, and the patterns of the pentatonic scale.