Beginner Guitar Scales: 5 Essential Scales

2) Two Octave E Blues Scale

Here’s the tab for a two octave blues scale in the key of E.

We’re still using the first half of the regular blues scale, we’ve just added a few notes to complete the second octave.

3) Two Octave G Major Pentatonic Scale

Here’s the tab for a two octave G major pentatonic scale.

Can you see how the first half of the G major pentatonic is exactly same as the previous scale pattern? All we’ve done is add notes to complete the octave.

4) Two Octave G Major Scale

Here’s the tab for a two octave G major scale. This one’s a finger twister so make sure you practice it slowly!

5) Two Octave E Minor Scale

This E minor scale can be a little tricky to play, so make sure you practice it slowly and carefully. Nail each note!

These scales are a lot more challenging than the initial scales that we learnt. Learning two octave scales is the quickest way to get amazing at guitar scales!

What Is A Scale?

A scale is a group of musical notes. Technically, you could pick a few different notes and group them together, and call it a scale.

Scales usually contain 5-12 different notes. Scales fall into two main categories, major and minor.

Along with major and minor scales, you also get pentatonic and blues scales.

If you can have a good understanding of these scales, you’ll be rocking in no time.

There’s loads more to learn about guitar scales, click here to find out more: Learn Guitar Scales In 8 Easy Steps

Why do I need to know beginner guitar scales?

Now you’re probably wondering… “Yeah it’s great learning all these scales, but do I actually need to know them?”

In short, the answer is yes. You need to know guitar scales dude! We’re going to show you 3 reasons why you need to learn guitar scales.

1) Scales Improve Your Musicality

Learning scales is a great way of increasing your musicality.

Musical scales can be used to create melodies. They also allow you to improvise!

Without scales, it’s almost impossible to create a solo or to write a tune. It’s SO important that you know how to play beginner guitar scales.

Here are a few scenarios when you could use beginner guitar scales:

• If you’re in a band, and you’re asked to take a solo.
• If you want to write a melody line to a song you’ve written.
• If you want to write a rockin’ guitar riff.

If you’d like to learn more about lead guitar, check out these articles:

• How To Play Lead Guitar
• Guitar Tabs For Beginners: 20 Easy Songs That Sound Great

Beginner guitar scales are essential to know if you want to create amazing sounding solos.

Check out this killer article from Guitar World, to find out what the 50 greatest guitar solos of all time are: 50 Greatest Guitar Solos

2) Learning Scales Enhances Your Technique

Scales are a great way of enhancing your guitar technique. Fretting notes and playing individual strings can be hard when you’re first starting.

By learning beginner guitar scales, you’re forcing yourself to play things correctly. This is perfect for developing your guitar technique!

3) Scales Make You Sound Amazing

Learning guitar scales is a quick fire way of sounding amazing.

If you learn guitar scales, it gives you the skill to take guitar solos, to write melodies and to enhance your technique.

We guarantee that if you learn guitar scales, you WILL become an amazing guitarist.

When can I use these guitar scales?

It’s great learning guitar scales. However, it’s pointless knowing guitar scales if you don’t know when you can use them.

In this section, we’re going to show you when you can use beginner guitar scales.

To know when we can use beginner guitar scales, we need to understand a little about musical keys.

What’s a musical key?

A musical key is a group of scales and chords which work together.

How does this relate to guitar scales?

Okay, listen up. This is important.

Each guitar scale belongs to a specific musical key. We can break musical keys into two types.

Those are major keys and minor keys.

• For every major key, you have a major scale.
• For every minor key, you have a minor scale.

Pretty simple right?

How does this work?

What this means is that if you have a song in a major key, you can play the following scales.

• The Major Scale.
• The Major Pentatonic Scale.

If a song is a minor key, you can use these scales:

• The Minor Scale.
• The Minor Pentatonic.

All you have to worry about is what key that song or backing track is in.

For example, if you want to practice the G major scale/G major pentatonic scale, your backing track/song has to be in the key of G major.

Or, let’s say you wanted to practice improvising in the key of E minor.

You could use a:

• E Minor Scale.
• E Minor Pentatonic Scale.

Can you see how the names of these scales relates to the key?

This works for ANY key, so for example if you learnt a C major scale, you could play it over a song in the key of C.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re improvising, writing a melody or creating guitar riffs. As long as your musical key lines up with the appropriate scale, you’ll be fine.

How do I work out a musical key?

Okay, now we understand how musical keys relate to beginner guitar scales.

Let’s find out how we can work out a musical key.

It’s SO easy, this trick is going to blow your minds. I hope you’re ready for this..

To work out the key of a song, all you have to do is check the first and last chord of a song. That’s it!

It almost sounds too easy doesn’t it? Let’s put it into practice.

Here’s a chord progression:

G Major |E Minor |C Major |D Major |G Major

So if we follow our rule, let’s check the first and last chord of this progression.

As you can see, the first and last chord is G major.

Therefore, the key of this song is in G major.

See, easy right!

Let’s try another one.

What key do you think this progression is in?

E Minor |A Minor |D Minor |E Minor

If you look at the first and last chords of this progression, you can tell that this chord progression is in the key of E minor.

To learn more about musical keys, go here: Guitar Keys: An Essential Guide

Why is this useful to know?

This is so important to understand! If you can work out a musical key, it means you can use your beginner guitar scales.

By using your beginner guitar scales in a musical context, you will become a better guitarist.