The magic ingredient to becoming a lead guitarist is the guitar scale. You will need to get familiar with guitar scales to the point you can play them anywhere on the guitar moving from one note to the next quickly.

The 4 most commonly used scales are the minor pentatonic, major pentatonic, major and minor scales. We’ll start by looking at each of these in this guitar lesson. You will go through a simple exercise for each guitar scale to build your familiarity and speed with each scale, by the end of this lesson you will be ready to jam with Kirk Hammett!

To improve your speed and overall ability you should use the alternate picking method when practicing guitar scales. It is very easy to achieve, pick the string downward for the first note, then upward for the next continue to alternate as you play.

The only other tool I would recommend besides a good pick is a metronome or backing track where you can set the tempo. You will want to practice these guitar scales at very slow tempos to begin with.

The Major Scale

The Major scale is first on the list of guitar scales you are going to learn. Each guitar scale follows a certain pattern, this is what you want to commit to memory. We will be looking at the C Major Scale as our example:

C to D : tone

D to E : tone

E to F : semi-tone

F to G : tone

G to A : tone

A to B : tone

B to C : semi-tone

C major exercise for you to try at our Guitar Scales page on InstantGuitarist.com.

Minor Scales

Minor scales are found from the 6th note in the key you are playing in, so if we are playing a song in the key of C our relative minor scale will be A Minor. Here is how the Minor scale is constructed:

A to B : tone

B to C : semi-tone

C to D : tone

D to E : tone

E to F : semi-tone

F to G : tone

G to A : semi-tone

Your A Minor practice routine is at our website, go check it out now.

Major Pentatonic Scale on Guitar

A pentatonic scale is one that is comprised of only 5 notes, and as such these are easy to learn and use when improvising over backing tracks and creating new lead lines. To create a Major Pentatonic scale we take just the first, second, third, fifth and sixth notes from the Major Scale. So looking at our C Major Scale this would work out to be the notes: C, D, E, G and A.

Your C Major Pentatonic Homework:

Minor Pentatonic Scale on Guitar

Just like the Major Pentatonic scale the Minor is constructed of only 5 notes, the notes are chosen from the relative minor scale in the key you are playing. So for our key of C the Minor Pentatonic scale will be A Minor and will contain these notes: A, C, D, E, G.

Your homework assignment for the A Minor scale is something which will get you onto the road of becoming a lead guitarist. I want you to first find a YouTube video for Eric Clapton’s incredibly famous song “Layla”. Listen to it the whole way through 3-5 times first.

What you will do is jam over Eric Clapton through the chorus and the solo, you will use the D Minor Pentatonic scale and anything goes, you can either play the exercise in time with the music, or make up your own little runs. Below is the solo for “Layla”. Have fun!

Learning lead guitar is something that all guitarists should undertake, Adam Summers provides more information so you can learn how to play guitar as quickly as possible. Check out the extra articles under Lead Guitar so you can learn guitar scales fast.