My son has been asking about guitar solos lately. In past posts I’ve talked about how I think it’s a mistake when first learning to play guitar worrying too much about scales and theory, but as you progress in skill level and want to start improvising and soloing, scales are no longer optional. He has already learned some basic chords as well as how to read tablature and play a few parts of songs. He hasn’t learned any scales yet.

This brings up questions like: what is the best first scale to learn on the guitar? What’s a good way to memorize this scale? My recommendation is practice, repetition and keeping the information in front of you:

The blues scale shown as a desktop background above is a common scale used in a lot of music. Not only blues, but good old rock and roll. Staring at it as a desktop background might help to burn the pattern into your brain.

The blues scale can be played in any key with the root note (circled in red) indicating the key you are playing. For example, if you are playing on the fifth fret, E string, you’d be playing the blues scale in the key of A. Drop down to the third fret E string and you’re playing in the key of G.

The pattern on strings is as follows (shown playing in key of F), note for beginning guitarists that the 6th string is the top most string from top to bottom and is the lowest sounding, while the 1st string is the high E and often denoted in tab as a lowercase e:

6th string E: frets 1,4
5th string A: frets 1,2,3
4th string D: frets 1,3
3rd string G: frets 1,3,4
2nd string B: frets 1,4
1st string e: frets 1,4

One of the first things I learned about the guitar was that a note 12 frets above is the same note an octave higher. So if you do an open E string and move up to the 12th fret and play on the same string, that is the E key again, on the 13th fret that would be F and so on. Here is a list of the notes from fret 0 - 12 on the 6th string:

0 1 2   3  4    5  6    7  8  9 10 11 12

E F F# G A♭ A B♭ B C C# D E♭ E

These notes repeat themselves on frets 12-24 like this:

12 13 14 15 16   17  18   19 20 21 22  23  24
E   F   F# G  A♭ A   B♭ B   C  C# D  E♭ E

Tip for beginning guitarists: if you want to make it easier to solo high pitched notes, be sure to buy/play a guitar with 24 frets. I believe most, if not all Ibanez electric guitars, have 24 frets. That’s the guitar I bought for my son to practice on. The Gibson Les Paul guitar I bought has only 22 frets. You can reach 24 fret notes on a 22 fret guitar, you just have to bend the strings. This can significantly increase the difficulty of soloing these higher notes.

You can see from the blues scale chart on my desktop that if you played the root note (circled in red on the screenshot) starting on the 7th fret 6th string, using the following pattern you’d be playing in the key of B:

6th string: 7, 11
5th string: 7, 8, 9
4th string: 7, 10
3rd string: 7, 10,11
2nd string: 7, 11
1st string: 7, 11

Got it? This is the very first scale and pattern I’m showing my son. I’ve recommended he start each practice session by playing the blues scale front and back several times saying aloud the key he is playing in, working his way up the fretboard. At the same time working on his speed and alternate picking (back/forth/back). Through repetition one can become quite fast at playing these notes.

Once he’s practiced the pattern, I recommended to him to play the notes out of order, adjusting the speed and bending, hammer-ons and pull-offs. This is the stuff that guitar soloing is made of and a lot more fun than just repeating the scales over and over again. You have to start somewhere.

This basic knowledge coupled with memorizing the scale pattern above comes in very handy when riffing, improvising and soloing on the guitar. You could also make music in any key by sticking with this scale. So if you were playing a chord and needed a little riff to go along, the blues scale could help.

Rock on.

Did this post make you go hmm?

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