Is There Any Point to Learning Scales, or Are They Only Good as a Warm-Up Exercise?

Yes, it’s great to run through some scales to warm up your fingers before jumping into your most recent song that you’re working on, but is that all that they’re good for?

Absolutely not!

Here are just a few examples of when you can draw on your knowledge of scales to make yourself a better guitarist and musician.

Improvising

One major area of playing an instrument that will require knowledge of scales is when you are improvising.

Improvising will require prior knowledge of not only how to play scales on the guitar (or your instrument of choice), but when it will be appropriate to use certain scales.

For example, if you are improvising over a 12 bar blues chord progression, if you know the minor pentatonic, major pentatonic, blues scale, or mixolydian scale, you can use this to improvise a solo over the band!

Knowing a scale is essentially knowing what notes you have available to you that will work when soloing.

When using a scale or toggling between different scales, imagine little light bulbs lighting up on the fretboard, showing you which notes are included in the scale.

This will become even more crucial when breaking out into more technical and theory dominant styles of music.

This would be the case in jazz music, as playing over chord changes will require you to change which scales/arpeggios you are using from chord to chord.

Not only will you need to know the scale in one static position, but all over the fretboard, to be able to link up your phrases through each chord change.

Navigate the Fretboard

This also leads us to our next situation where scales will become very useful to us, and that is to help us navigate the fretboard.

Navigating the fretboard will unlock the instrument so that we don’t have any grey areas of the neck where we don’t feel confident.

This would be one sure way to causing us to loose the flow in our improvisations, or will make things more difficult and slow down the learning process when learning new material.

By learning scales in multiple positions across the entire neck, we are getting the full understanding of how everything connects and relates to each other.

You can start with simple pentatonic scales and major scales, then over time, learn how different modes connect across the fretboard.

This will also allow you to choose what position you would like to play phrases in, rather than just being limited to playing it in the only position that you know.

Music Theory

A major hurdle that many musicians find themselves in is lacking music theory knowledge, which can hold them back in their playing and from fully understanding what is happening in the music.

This can be particularly hard when the guitar is your main or only instrument, as the layout of the notes on the fretboard doesn’t always visually make sense at first, then trying to link theory concepts to chord shapes or scales that you already know how to play.

This is due to the tuning of the guitar being tuned in mostly fourths (except the B string), which creates the hurdle of sequences looking different on the fretboard in different octaves and positions.

An instrument where this can perhaps make a little more sense when trying to understand music theory is on the piano.

Due to the sequence of notes being the same in each octave, keys players generally tend to have a good knowledge of music theory from being able to clearly see how things relate back to the instrument.

If we have a good knowledge of scales, let’s take the major scale for example, then we are able to use this as a tool for finding what degree certain notes are in a chord to then be able to identify or alter them.

For example, if you were trying to find the name of a chord that contained a note outside of 1-3-5-7 in a major 7th chord, you could play through the major scale from the same root note to be able to identify what degree this extra note is (e.g. the 4th, 6th, 9th, 11th etc).

Songwriting

If you wish to get a little more creative with your scales, why not use them in your songwriting? Perhaps you are trying to write a riff on the guitar but can’t find that missing note to give the riff an added flavour and to not sound too typical.

Try running the minor pentatonic or natural minor scale and listen out for any note that sounds like it may give it that point of difference.

Try auditioning different notes from one of these scales into your existing riff to see what gives you your desired sound.

Technical Proficiency

Although we can use scales as a warm up exercise, we can take this a step further and use these to really build up our technical proficiency as a guitarist.

Instead of just playing the scales up and down as you always do, why not try playing them in different intervals?

Try playing them in a thirds pattern, fourths, fifths, and so on. This will really work your brain and challenge your knowledge of intervals.

You could also use the scales to play with a metronome, starting slow and then gradually building up the speed.

Start off by finding a comfortable speed to play the scale at, ensuring that it’s not too fast so that you’re playing becomes messy, then slowly build up by 5 BPM every few days or week by week.

This will happen over longer periods of time, as your muscles will need time to work up to tempo to be able to cleanly play these scales.

Over time, you will see a big increase in your speed and technical proficiency on the guitar.

Ear Training

One great asset to have as a musician is to have a good ear, which will allow you to learn songs just by listening or at the very least be able to learn things quickly with sheet music/TAB.

By playing scales in different intervals as mentioned earlier, you are getting to know the sound of different intervals.

I’m sure that you can picture the sound of a perfect 5th, and if you don’t know what that sounds like just think of the “Star Wars” theme song.

There are many resources online that will give you an example of a well known song that will help you to instantly identify the intervals between certain notes. To name just a few:

Minor 2nd – “Jaws” theme

Major 2nd – “Happy Birthday”

Major 3rd – “When The Saints Go Marching In”

Perfect 4th – “Here Comes The Bride”

Tritone – “The Simpsons” theme

Perfect 5th – “Star Wars” theme

Once you are able to identify the interval just from hearing it, you will be able to quickly learn material and know what note to play next, all from using scales as more than just a warm up exercise.