How To Practice Guitar Scales To Get Speed That Makes Your Solos Sound Amazing
Practicing guitar scales with speed can be an incredible way to play amazing solos that get the attention of anyone who hears you play – if you practice them correctly!
Most people don’t though.
So, what is the missing key here?
Answer:
Not only do you need to practice guitar scales with speed, you have to practice them while thinking of them as musical notes.
Everything you play needs to sound good as music in addition to sounding good on its own through your technical skill.
Use these scale practice approaches to get speed and great guitar playing creativity all at once so your solos sound awesome:
Train Yourself For Musically Expressive Speed
One of the biggest mistakes guitarists make is only practicing scales in complete isolation.
What does this mean?
This is when you (for example) practice a scale up and down to a metronome over and over.
Why is this a mistake?
Well, it’s okay to do this sometimes of course BUT…
You don’t learn how to use the scale in actual music with this approach.
Result: You try to play guitar solos or improvise, but it just sounds like you’re playing a scale instead of a badass solo. Plus, you don’t have as much usable speed while playing music, because you have more to think about than just playing a scale up and down.
So, what do you do?
Train yourself by making your guitar speed practice as musical as possible.
Here are a few ways to do it:
1. Improvise with the scales, arpeggios and licks you learn. For example: Create a simple phrase using just a few notes, then try to play 20 variations of it using as many techniques as you can think of. This is really fun and doesn’t take a long time.
2. Always look for ways to combine different techniques/patterns together. For example: Combine arpeggios together with scales, or find arpeggio patterns within the scale patterns you play.
3. Train yourself to increase your usable speed rather than just your raw speed.
What does this means exactly?
Master Speed Picking While Practicing Scales
Scales are a great tool to help you perfect your speed picking technique.
The secret is to play just a few notes at a time with the absolute best timing and articulation to make them sound great.
Narrowing your focus helps you do this without overwhelming your brain with too many notes.
Try this:
Practice only the first three notes of a scale using all tremolo picking for one minute (repeat the notes over and over).
Then play the notes again (continually for one minute) as fast as you can using your normal picking approach.
Next, add one more note and repeat the process.
You’d be surprised at how much easier speed picking makes normal picking feel.
Practice Guitar Scales Over A Backing Track
Part of mastering scales is learning how each note in the scale feels over different chords. This helps you learn to solo with them in a creative and expressive manner.
Practicing this is easy to do and fun as well!
Here is how to do it:
·
Choose any guitar scale you know and want to
improvise with.
·
Create a backing track of the very first note of
the scale played over and over.
·
Play the backing track and play the first note
of the scale several times. As you do this, observe how the note feels. Is it
relaxed or tense?
·
Play note number two of the scale. How does this
one feel?
· Continue this way until you’ve played every note in the scale.
From here, focus on improvising over your backing track with just 2-3 notes at a time.
While doing this, use many different techniques to create as much variety as you can with a limited number of notes.
Make it your goal to create and resolve tension with as little notes as possible. Before you know it, you’ll be creating long guitar solos that are super-dramatic and awesome!
Hint: Speed is a great tool for creating tension without changing the note. Apply this idea using speed picking to repeat a single note many times before playing a new one.
Integrate Guitar Scales Creatively With Arpeggios
Don’t feel like you always need to keep scales separate from other aspects of your guitar playing. Most people don’t feel this way, but unconsciously separate their skills.
This results in guitar solo phrases that feel less connected and smooth.
The better you integrate your skills, the more seamless your soloing becomes and the better it sounds in general.
Combining scales with arpeggios is a great way to give yourself more creative soloing options while improving your technique and phrasing at the same time.
This video shows you how to do it:
Now you know many ways to make your guitar scales not only faster, but more creative and usable in music.
Now it’s time to overcome one of the common obstacles that gets in the way of fast and melodic guitar playing: sloppy mistakes.