Online Guitar Scale Lesson - The Power Of Melodic Patterns
A problem that many guitar players encounter at some stage in their musical development is the inability to solo using scales in a musical way. They memorize scale fingerings, but never seem to reach the point of making music with them. Why do you think that is?
Well…the answer is quite complex. There are many factors involved. In this online guitar scale lesson we’ll focus on one factor. So, what is that one factor?
They have only practiced the scale fingering playing it straight up-and-down.
This is pretty much a life-sentence to an eternity of mechanical and unmusical solos. OK…that’s a bit of an exaggeration. :-)But you get my point.
If guitar solos that sound too “scaley” sound familiar to you…don’t worry. Almost all guitar players struggle with this when they initially learn a scale fingering. So how can you overcome this challenge? There are two powerful strategies that I recommend to all my one-to-one students. (There are other strategies, but the following two are a great place to start)…
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Compose licks that use notes from the guitar scale fingering.
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Learn to play melodic patterns using the scale fingering. (You may hear other guitarists calling these sequences or sequential patterns. These terms all mean the same thing).
For this online guitar scale lesson we’ll focus on the second strategy…
Learning Melodic Patterns
Before I reveal how melodic patterns help you, let’s take a look at an example to show you exactly what they are. For this example, we’ll use the following scale fingering for the C Harmonic Minor scale…
C Harmonic Minor Fingering: 1 2 b3 4 5 b6 7
Please take a few minutes to memorize this fingering. Watch out for the wide stretch between fingers 1 and 3 when you are playing the notes on the B-string. 
Let’s now take some of the notes of the scale fingering above and create an exercise that uses a melodic pattern. Please notice that it’s played using alternate picking. Notice also that I’ve put the fingers that I use to play the exercise underneath the TAB…
Please take some time to play through the exercise. Can you hear some kind of logic to the order of the notes? In what ways do you think learning the exercise will help your playing?
I guess a good question to ask at this point is…
How do melodic patterns help you learn to solo more musically?
I feel melodic patterns help you in three very major ways…
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They develop your ears. As you practice melodic patterns you are imprinting melodic ideas into your mind’s ear. And in general, the more melodies and melodic patterns you imprint into your mind’s ear, the more musical your soloing will become.
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They improve your memory of the scale fingering. The more melodic patterns you learn using a particular scale fingering, the more you reinforce your memory of the fingering. Guitar players who forget scale fingerings generally have not spent enough time practicing them using melodic patterns.
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They improve your technique. Playing a scale fingering using a melodic pattern will develop your technique much more than just playing the scale fingering straight up-and-down. As your technique improves you can learn more complex and challenging melodic patterns. This ensures that your technique keeps on progressively improving.
Well…that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this online guitar scale lesson! Work hard at the exercise and see if you can make up some of your own.
If you would like to discover the EXACT step-by-step methods that I use to learn, internalize and master guitar scales, then be sure to check out: Guitar Scale Mastery . It’s definitely not for beginners, but if you are an intermediate-level improvising guitarist it will probably help you a lot.
