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Ok, so I've been playing my black jackson guitar for 6 years now, and I suck.
I never got any music lessons so I've being scraping by with tabs and video tutorials.
But I've finally grew tired of playing easy tunes and not being able to solo whatsoever.
So, I decided it's time for me to learn my music. Scales, chords, progressions, all that jazz and practise with it till I get enough dexterity and knowhow to play some proper stuff.
And here's my very noob question.
What does it mean to learn a scale? As I understand this, it means that I should be able to play the scale in each and every position on the fretboard. Is this correct?
And if it is so, does that mean that I just have to memorize a scale for all positions and then learn to connect them? Is that the way to learn scales?
I have found this site http://www.all-guitar-chords.com, and I have being practising some major and blues pentatonic. Is this a good source?
Um, should I learn by memory all notes on the fretboard btw or will it come through playing?
Finally, pls share whatever info/advise/source you may find helpful for a beginner in music theory.
 
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Do you have a friend who plays guitar? Early on when I started electric guitar, I had a friend who was more experienced with the instrument. We played the same music etc. and he showed me a couple of things and whatnot. From there on I just played or attempted to play music that I like (from tabs) and that's how I improved.
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I'll tell you what I've read in my "Blues You Can Use"-Book, you to start by learning one part of the scale,
like the first part of the pentatonic blues scale, and practice it on all positions. Aftwerwards, you add on the next part until you know all five of them. As you add on parts, you keep practicing the older parts together with them.
I can only recommend the book, it really thaught me a lot about the basics of playing the guitar and blues.
Good luck, and don't forget to not only practice, but still have fun playing the guitar.^^
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Hey  I know what you mean about wanting to finally learn some solid stuff..
The biggest thing my first teacher taught me was the two most important rules/things to know about guitar:
1) How to properly tune your guitar
2) Know the names of the notes on the fretboard (This is the hard one)
Knowing the names of the notes will allow you to bridge gaps with your theory (I myself still am not 100% on this however)
A really good book that helped me a lot (It can be kinda confusing, but at the same time has lot of useful information) :
http://www.amazon.com/Al-Di-Meola-Chords-Arpeggios/dp/0793526779/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1334587974&sr=8-2
edit: The pentatonic scales are the most commonly used scales. They are based on 5 notes, thus the "Pent" in Pentatonic.
You can hear the minor and major pentatonic scales in almost all popular music.. so that's a good start : )
Next most commonly used scales are the Major and Minor scales. These are based off of 8 notes (1 and 8 being the same note)
edit 2: Sometimes a good base in theory can be just as good as knowing every little nuance. Some great players just played and learned on their own and didn't learn theory until way later in their career (Jimi Hendrix is a prime example). One of the greatest neo-classical style guitarists, Yngwie Malmsteen, said that improvement can come from simply playing.. a lot.
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if you want to learn music properly, do yourself a favour and find a god damn teacher. You'll get no where with books and the internet.
EDIT: There are self-taught people who became "decent" but there'll always be holes in their knowledge. Only a few self-taught people became really good but not that I know of. Getting a teacher is far superior than self-taught, the only downside is the money which i think it's totally worth it
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On April 17 2012 00:39 brachester wrote:
if you want to learn music properly, do yourself a favour and find a god damn teacher. You'll get no where with books and the internet.
I disagree to some extent, and do agree. The reason I disagree is because there is endless supplies available online now a days, and it all depends on how determined you are about it . Guitar lessons arent cheap. It's typically 25/hr around here, and you will need weeks of lessons to get anywhere. (That's $1200 a year if you take one lesson a week)
I do agree with you because unless you are ardent about it and really put in some effort it will be a lot harder than getting a teacher.
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Firstly, if you are feeling this way you should dive into theory completely. Get a good textbook and read it over until you understand it. The Kostka Payne is one of the more widely used books; it's not the best one, but it will cover all of the basics.
I don't know guitar intimately enough chords and scale wise, but if you want to be learning scales, and other techniques, you need to know what they are, and then practice them a bazillion times until your fingers know where to go immediately. Sure you can learn songs and the like more wrote-like, but that seems to be at odds with what you want to be doing anyway.
Big thing to remember is that there's is no substitute for practice as a musician. You simply have to do things over and over and over again until you have hem ingrained into you. This is why we have strict exercise books to help with these things in many cases.
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On April 17 2012 00:45 Th1rdEye wrote:Show nested quote +On April 17 2012 00:39 brachester wrote:
if you want to learn music properly, do yourself a favour and find a god damn teacher. You'll get no where with books and the internet. I disagree to some extent, and do agree. The reason I disagree is because there is endless supplies available online now a days, and it all depends on how determined you are about it . Guitar lessons arent cheap. It's typically 25/hr around here, and you will need weeks of lessons to get anywhere. (That's $1200 a year if you take one lesson a week) I do agree with you because unless you are ardent about it and really put in some effort it will be a lot harder than getting a teacher.
$1200/year is cheap.
But like I said, there are self-taught people who became decent, but without someone to point out your mistakes, you'll always have holes in your knowledge and it'll become increasingly difficult to fix it with times
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Can you read changes? And by that I mean more than Am, E7, D etc....I'm talking about (and I can't type it here) D7flat9 or E13 and understand what these mean and how to play them? This is a big deal. I'm not good at soloing at all (trumpet) but I can read changes like a boss.
As for scales, if you really want to be a jazz musician at a good level, blues and pentatonic scales won't cover it. It's a good start, though. A friend of mine said that he could solo to anything with a pentatonic scale. Not sure if I agree, but it's not my call. IMO, Majors, the three forms of the minors, and the modes are needed.
http://www.zentao.com/guitar/modes/
^this is actually not a terrible website.
Quick question though, you said:
What does it mean to learn a scale? As I understand this, it means that I should be able to play the scale in each and every position on the fretboard. Is this correct?
And I'm not trying to be a dick, but are you aware that every different note has its own scale? Or are you referring to being able to play the A major scale when starting on open and A, E-string A (5th fret right? :/) and so on and so forth?
Me no good at guitar, so I confuzzle.
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On April 17 2012 02:37 MaximusT wrote:Can you read changes? And by that I mean more than Am, E7, D etc....I'm talking about (and I can't type it here) D7flat9 or E13 and understand what these mean and how to play them? This is a big deal. I'm not good at soloing at all (trumpet) but I can read changes like a boss. As for scales, if you really want to be a jazz musician at a good level, blues and pentatonic scales won't cover it. It's a good start, though. A friend of mine said that he could solo to anything with a pentatonic scale. Not sure if I agree, but it's not my call. IMO, Majors, the three forms of the minors, and the modes are needed. http://www.zentao.com/guitar/modes/^this is actually not a terrible website. Quick question though, you said: Show nested quote + What does it mean to learn a scale? As I understand this, it means that I should be able to play the scale in each and every position on the fretboard. Is this correct? And I'm not trying to be a dick, but are you aware that every different note has its own scale? Or are you referring to being able to play the A major scale when starting on open and A, E-string A (5th fret right? :/) and so on and so forth? Me no good at guitar, so I confuzzle.
Pretty sure he's not talking about scale degrees, but scales, like mode 1 octatonic on B or G harmonic minor. 
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Learning scales simply means you know all the notes in it. Say G major, the notes are G-A-B-C-D-E-F#. Thats the easy part, now you need to also know where all those notes are on the fretboard. Not sure what you mean by position, but I guess you can learn how to play an octave starting on all the Gs? Its hard to learn scales if you dont already know where the notes are on the fretboard.
Something you can do to learn the notes faster is choose a scale, then start it as low as possible and play as many octaves as you can before reaching the highest note on the high e. Doing this, youll have choices of how to continue playing by either advancing on the same string or going up to a higher string. Repeat often and eventually you will know where all the notes for that particular scale are!
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What wo1f said, also I'm not talking bout jazz, just used it as an expression. lol
I'm interested in rock, blues, metal and whatever else may come,).
Also I don't have a clue bout what u talking bout. I'm completely illiterate in music theory.
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On April 17 2012 03:17 Steveling wrote:
What wo1f said, also I'm not talking bout jazz, just used it as an expression. lol
I'm interested in rock, blues, metal and whatever else may come,).
Also I don't have a clue bout what u talking bout. I'm completely illiterate in music theory.
Then I would recommend learning some music theory
http://www.8notes.com/theory/
Super basic stuff, you'll blow through the first lessons in no time at all. This basically covers everything I learned in my first semester of college theory (with some additions and exceptions of course).
Also, if you haven't done so, you should learn the note names of every fret, practice scale patterns, and learn the chords. I say scale patterns because (and correct me if I'm wrong) can't you learn fingering patterns that apply to any fret (on that string) for certain scales?
If you do opt for lessons, you should try to forget everything you have tried to teach yourself, because you may end up clashing with your instructor. This happened to me, which is why I stopped playing and suck at guitar
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I am also self taught guitar player who wished he knew theory and all that other jazz. Rather than, I can play this song someone else figured out.
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United States1292 Posts
It depends what you want to do with it in the future. There is no better way to improve than having a teacher. The people who are self taught masters have gaping holes in their play that they make up for with other things, and in the end nobody cares how you play as long as you can make it sound good like they can.
A forum can't teach you tone, style, intonation, which are three very important things to have when playing.
Guitar is easier than most instruments, and it one of the more common pick up and play kinds. I play violin and i would be absolute trash without a teacher. I happen to have one of the best teachers around, so I'm slowly becoming perfect by spending years on fundamentals, but any teacher can make you good at guitar, or at least much better than you are now.
More importantly, are you having fun playing guitar? If it frustrates you and you've been playing for that long, it might not be worth your time to learn. You get what you put into it.
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EPT
