How to Get the Best Results from Your Practice Time

So What is the Best Guitar Scale Fingering System?
It all depends on whom you ask.

Most guitar players tend to favour the first guitar scale fingering system they learned.  After all, it’s the way they have always played guitar scales, so it must therefore be the best, right?

The guitar scale fingering system that I use and recommend is the Berklee fingerings.  These are the guitar scale fingerings that I use for playing, teaching and in my books.

Most college and university level music programs use these guitar scale fingerings as well.  But not all do.  So again, as I mentioned in “Guitar Scales: What’s Wrong with Guitar Scale Fingerings”, each system has its own pros and cons.

The premise behind the Berklee guitar scale fingerings is very simple:  there is a guitar scale fingering built off of each note in the scale.

Since the major scale has seven notes in it, there are seven guitar scale fingerings for it.  There is a separate fingering starting on each note of the scale.

The first advantage of this system is that it keeps things really simple.  Seven note guitar scales have seven fingerings—one starting on each note.  Six note scales have six fingerings.  Five note guitar scales have five scale fingering patterns, etc.

The other great thing about the Berklee system is that it takes into consideration the bio-mechanics of your hand.  It’s set up so there are no position shifts within each guitar scale fingering.  This makes the Berklee system a really good system for improvisation, arpeggios, sight-reading, etc.

Before we take a look at some guitar scale fingerings, we need to take a look at how to read scale diagrams.

This will be the topic of my next post.  See you soon!

Has this Ever Happened to You?

You’re jamming with a friend and he or she plays a guitar scale that you know fairly well. The strange thing is you notice that your buddy uses a completely different guitar scale fingering than you were taught.

Or, what about this?

You look up a scale fingering in a few guitar scale books and see that each book shows different ways to play the same scale.

What gives?  Who’s right?

How Do You Know Which Guitar Scale Fingerings are Correct?

The guitar is an interesting beast.

Just like the piano, it has a long and diverse history. However, over the years piano technique has become pretty much standardized.

This means that most pianists will play a C major scale the exact same way.  On the guitar however as you’ve probably already discovered, it’s very different.  If you ask five guitarists to play the C major scale you’ll probably be amazed and perhaps even shocked at what you get.

On the piano as you move to the left, the notes get lower in pitch.  Move to the right and the notes get higher.

On the guitar you can move across the strings to get higher or lower pitched notes.  Or, you can move up or down the fretboard to produce higher or lower pitched notes.

Something else to consider is the presence of unisons.  A unison is simply two notes of identical pitch and letter-names.  The note C on the first fret of the second string can also be played on the third, fourth, fifth and sixth strings.  You can play this C on the first fret of the second string, on the fifth fret of the third string, on the tenth fret of the fourth string, on the fifteenth fret of the fifth string, or on the twentieth fret of the sixth string.  On the piano this note can only be played on one key.  So on the guitar the million dollar question is: “which C should you use in that scale?”

Don’t Worry

By now you’re starting to understand a little bit about what we are dealing with here.  The good news is you don’t really have to worry about any of this.

Over time different systems have evolved for playing guitar scales.

So Many Different Guitar Scale Approaches…So Little Time

What you need to know is that there are many different but overlapping approaches to guitar scale fingerings.  The confusion lies in the fact that guitar technique and guitar scale fingerings are not really standardized.

Classical guitarists tend to use an older system for playing guitar scales, while contemporary guitarists will use newer systems that are based around five or seven fingerings.

All of the systems for guitar scale fingerings work.  Each has its own distinct advantages and disadvantages.  For every great guitar player you find that uses one guitar scale fingering system, you can find another great guitarist that uses a different system.

This explains why you can find the major scale shown many different ways in guitar scale books.  One book might be based on one system while another guitar scale book might use a different guitar scale fingering system.

So What is the Best Guitar Scale Fingering System?

This I’ll answer in part 2 of this post…