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!