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Guitar Scale - Guitar Lessons - The Thrill of Soloing

In this guitar lesson, not only will you learn about the concept of soloing, but you will learn a great guitar scale which you will use in soloing.

Think of soloing as snowboarding, pool skating, rollerblading, or ski jumping. In a split second, you use moves and tricks to create your own unique style.

The idea of soloing or improvising began with composing. Composing is to form musical phrases (similar to sentences) into a melody that is pleasing to the ear. Soloing is just composing on the spot, spontaneously.

Composing music and writing a short story are almost the same process except one uses musical note phrases and the other word phrases. A good composition (song) as well as a good solo should tell a story.

Some of the best story tellers were and are blues musicians. Rock guitar heroes like Jimmy Hendrix, Jimmy Page, and Eric Clapton studied and borrowed from the blues masters Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, Albert King, and Robert Johnson to name a few.

A Scale is a series of notes between 5 and 12 notes long. Scales are used for:

1. Guitar Solos
2. Developing finger coordination, speed, and accuracy
3. Writing melodies(Songwriting)

It is possible to play the same scale in many different places on the guitar fingerboard. I will refer to this as playing in a position(1st position, 4th position etc...)

Usually, when practicing scales, we play the scale from the lowest note to the highest note.

This is the first scale you will learn on this site. It is a great scale to start soloing with because it gives you many more choices for cool and easy guitar licks and guitar techniques than other open position scales. You will learn to play all of the beginning to intermediate guitar techniques (bends, vibrato, etc..)with the notes of the E Blues scale.

Can't read this notation? Go to guitar notation

• Practice the E blues scale slowly at first

• Pick the string at the same time that you put your finger on the fret

• Let each note ring(like the audio clip)

• Practice with the metronome somewhere between 40 and 60

• Try increasing your speed by 5 every few days

• Try alternating picking or hammer-ons and pull-offs