Everything you need to start playing great guitar solos - Give it a go
A simple way of looking at this guitar scale picture. An easier way to look at these guitar scale patterns is to make 3 patterns instead of 5. This may help you in the beginning to at least get it into your memory.
At the end of the day though, It's important to familiarize yourself with the whole group of interlocking scale patterns.
The simplified version is pattern 1, pattern 3, and pattern 5.
The fifth scale pattern will still interlock with the first though, so there's no getting away from that.
Where learning all 5 lead guitar patterns will come in handy. When you begin to use these patterns to play lead guitar over various chords, you'll start to notice that each pattern starts on a different note, and that note is the root note of the chord it works best over.
You'll also start to see extra patterns that fit best, like for instance if you're playing in the key of C over an F chord.
When playing lead guitar over an F chord, the scale pattern can be an extension of the 2nd pattern by starting at the first fret.
Experiment with what works best for you. When playing lead guitar, I like to use the notes that make up the chord I'm playing over as a foundation for the melody.
It has to resolve nicely into the chord, especially at the end of the guitar solo.
How this Major scale fretboard diagram works. Working out how to get these major scale patterns onto a fretboard created a few minor challenges for me, mostly because every one of these fingering patterns shares half of the notes in the preceding pattern.
You'll see here that there are five patterns.
All of the notes that have yellow in them are the first pattern, and those that have red in them are the second pattern and so on, but because they all share notes, I've had to use two colors.
