25 Guitar Scale Hacks

By Graham Tippett

When it comes to scales and improvising, the guitar fretboard is a maze, and this is both good and bad… Well, instead of bad, let’s say it’s ‘challenging’ because like any maze it’s easy to get lost, familiar routes can often lead to dead-ends, and it can be overwhelming to find your way out. On the other hand, we have countless routes (possibilities) to choose from, all of which provide different creative opportunities; what I’m basically saying is that by learning one or two scale systems to ‘get through the maze’, we stop seeing (or even avoid) the many other ways there are to navigate the fretboard. This is where 25 Guitar Scale Hacks comes in.

This book is about exploring the fretboard using those other routes to create motion, fluidity and bring the music out of any static pattern. Here, we dispense with the standard patterns such as 3NPS scales or the CAGED system in order to explore the many other patterns, nuances and hacks the guitar fretboard has to offer.

Who is this book for?
This book is for the intermediate to advancing students who really want to make their playing stand out from the crowd, feel stuck in a rut, or want to move away from rote pattern playing and predictable-sounding solos.

25 Guitar Scale Hacks looks at improvisation based on the guitar fretboard; in other words, we’re putting the guitar and all its nuances first, rather than working from generic patterns that are traditionally taught in scale and arpeggio books. The concept of 25 Guitar Scale Hacks then is a collection of mini-lessons or hacks for a deeper exploration of scales and how to make music with them. Feel free to work through the book in the order it’s written or choose the hacks that interest you the most.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Unlock the Guitar
• Release date: Feb 27, 2019

Book preview

Hacks!

Introduction

When it comes to scales and improvising, the guitar fretboard is a maze, and this is both good and bad… Well, instead of bad, let’s say it’s ‘challenging’ because like any maze it’s easy to get lost, familiar routes can often lead to dead-ends, and it can be overwhelming to find your way out. On the other hand, we have countless routes (possibilities) to choose from, all of which provide different creative opportunities; what I’m basically saying is that by learning one or two scale systems to ‘get through the maze’, we stop seeing (or even avoid) the many other ways there are to navigate the fretboard.

This book is about exploring the fretboard using those other routes to create motion, fluidity and bring the music out of any static pattern. Here, we dispense with the standard patterns such as 3NPS scales or the CAGED system in order to explore the many other patterns, nuances and hacks the guitar fretboard has to offer.

Who is this book for?

This book is for the intermediate to advancing students who really want to make their playing stand out from the crowd, feel stuck in a rut, or want to move away from rote pattern playing and predictable-sounding solos.

25 Guitar Scale Hacks looks at improvisation based on the guitar fretboard; in other words, we’re putting the guitar and all its nuances first, rather than working from generic patterns that are traditionally taught in scale and arpeggio books. The concept of 25 Guitar Scale Hacks then is a collection of mini-lessons or hacks for a deeper exploration of scales and arpeggios and how to make music with them. Feel free to work through the book in the order it’s written or choose the hacks that interest you the most.

To your best playing yet,

Graham Tippett

www.unlocktheguitar.net

1. Generic Patterns = Generic Playing

Think about it, there’s nothing more generic than the 5 minor pentatonic boxes, the 5 CAGED System chord/scale shapes and the 7 (should be 3) 3NPS (3-note-per-string) patterns.

By generic, I mean a couple of things: 1) they’re the patterns everyone learns, and 2) they don’t really take into account the nature of the guitar neck or its tuning; the CAGED patterns kind of fit around five chord shapes, the 3NPS system arbitrarily lays out 3 notes on each string and generates far more patterns than you really need if you’re inclined to play scales this way; and finally, pentatonic scales fall nicely on the guitar neck due a happy accident and sound generically great.

I am by no means discouraging the use of these patterns or systems, especially early on, but they do tend to cause players to get into ruts (sometimes for years) when they reach the intermediate level. 3NPS scales, for example, lend themselves

Reviews for 25 Guitar Scale Hacks

[SG Lauck · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great hacks for this newbie. I comprehend scales but this book gave me some insights I would never have thought.