Tag Archives: pentatonic scale

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.

Perhaps my favorite way to learn the pentatonic scale up the fretboard is through the use of repeating patterns. In this lesson we’ll take a look at the repeating patterns concept and how we can apply to the pentatonic scale to create a fun and effective exercise for learning the pentatonic scale.

If you’ve been a reader of this site for any length of time, you know I’m a huge advocate of the CAGED system. It’s so valuable for learning guitar and it makes navigating the fretboard so much easier. For that reason, I’ve put a lot of time into putting all of the pieces of the CAGED system together. In this lesson, we’re going to go through one of my favorite CAGED system soloing exercises that helps you map the CAGED system to the fretboard in a fun and musical way.

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.

Learning scales is quite a task and how you go about practicing guitar scales makes all the difference. No doubt it’s challenging, but learning to play them fluidly up and down the fretboard is so rewarding. While it takes time and effort to achieve, it can be simplified with a four step process that can make your practice much more effective.

Slow Dancing in a Burning Room is one of John Mayer’s best songs, both lyrically and musically. Musically, it’s rather simple. But the simplicity is what makes it so great. In this lesson we’ll break down the intro to the song and take a look at the chord progression and the riff he’s playing over top of the progression.

The pentatonic scale may be the most versatile scale in music. If there’s one scale guitar players must master, this is the one. In this lesson we’re going to look at some pentatonic scale exercises to help you thoroughly learn the scale patterns and play through them fluidly with flawless technique.