Learning Guitar Scales

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The reason behind learning guitar scales and all modes for guitar is of course to use them. Guitar scales in western music are played along with triads or "Chords", this process is called harmony, so what is harmony anyway?

Harmony is anything that's played along with a melody, in other words, harmony is "melody + chord". When we harmonize the major scale for example, we get 7 different chords from it in this order: MAJ - MIN - MIN - MAJ - MAJ - MIN - DIM, so if it's the C major scale, we get: CMAJ - DMIN - EMIN - FMAJ - GMAJ - AMIN - BDIM.

The most common scales that guitarists use are: The major scale and its modes, the minor scales (natural minor, harmonic minor, melodic minor), pentatonic guitar scales (major and minor) and blues guitar scales.

The most common way for beginners when improvising or soloing over a specific chord progression is to play one scale over all the chord progression, the key to find the scale is to find what chord this chord progression resolves to, if you discover this chord you can play the most appropriate mode or scale to it.

Note: This method is only if you're just starting and the only reason that makes great guitarists use it is with rapid chord changes.

The second and the more professional way is to play 1 scale or mode per chord, this means when the chord changes in a chord progression you have to play the corresponding scale to it (if you have 4 chords in a chord progression you have to play 4 different modes or scales).

The combination:

To make your playing perfect you have to use both of them, because sometimes you come across a fast chord change in chord progression, so you have to use the first one.