Don't Rely Too Much On Guitar Scale Charts

Many people get into playing the guitar by looking at charts and playing the scale patterns that are written. This is a fast and easy way to get going on the instrument and most people have benefitted from it at some point in their playing time. However, the supposed benefit may not be as great as you imagine.

The problem with these guitar scales charts is that you will forgo actually learning the intervals you are playing by sound, and instead just memorize them based on sight. This might sound fine to some people, but keep in mind that sight really has nothing to do with music.

If you only know a scale by a memorized pattern, one problem you will run into is a complete lack of knowledge when playing in an alternate tuning. Not only will you be less likely to improvise and figure things out effectively on the instrument, you won't be able to recognize things by sound that may now have a different fingering.

The guitar is an extremely flexible instrument when you take into account the different places that are possible to find the same notes, and the fact that the guitar strings can be tuned to anything you want them to be, even frequencies in between the normal western musical notes. Learning an instrument like this in such a rigid manner is to learn it incorrectly, and it's as simple as that.

What you should do instead of focusing on chord and scale charts is to use them just as a starting point and concentrate more on hearing the scales you are playing. After this, work on being able to play the scales in different parts of the guitar simply by ear. One way you can do this is by only playing on one string, where you obviously won't have a pattern to guide you.

The guitar needs to be approached in a flexible manner to take advantage of it's flexible nature, there is no reason to stick to the standard tuning that has unfairly monopolized music for centuries, to the detriment of all composers.