The Universal Scale for Guitar

By Anthony Spirou

The Universal Scale for Guitar is a step-by-step training manual designed to teach you to quickly and easily see a complete harmonic pattern of notes across the entire fretboard - 5 simple steps is all it takes to remember the entire scale! This one scale comprises all diatonic sequences, including the major, minor, dorian, phrygian, lydian, mixolydian and locrian scales.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781617926761

Book preview

Exercises

INTRODUCTION

The Universal Scale for Guitar is a map of note positions of the diatonic musical scales (based on the major and natural minor scales) on a guitar fretboard. It includes the ubiquitous major and natural minor scales, and all seven scale modes. This comprises a basis for playing and understanding western contemporary music, scales and chords on guitar.

The purpose of this book is to teach you the Universal Scale for Guitar, and to show you an easy method of learning the Universal Scale across the entire fretboard so that you can see and use it at a glance. Whereas most courses teach you subsets of this scale first (e.g. the pentatonic scales) and eventually allude to this scale in an attempt to keep things simple, it is my belief that this can also cause confusion as there is no understanding as to why those subsets exist or where they come from. But, you have to start somewhere and this book starts from the bigger picture.

With a few basic principles clarified, and a simple 5-step method to memorizing the entire scale across the whole fretboard, one can use this as a basis for understanding standard and popular guitar scales, and chords which fit within these scales. I'll take you through a simple technique I have created for learning and memorizing the Universal Scale for Guitar, and once you know it and can picture and use it at different positions on the fretboard, I'll