A Modern Method for Guitar Scales

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Berklee Textbook featured New Arrivals

Suggested Retail Price: $9.99
Format: Book
Pages: 96
Dimensions: 9x12
ISBN: 9781495077173
SKU: 00199318
Publication Date: June 01, 2018

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Guitar Scales 101

Organize the guitar fretboard, develop your technique, and learn to confidently navigate the instrument by gaining a firm understanding of the pentatonic, blues, major, melodic minor, and harmonic minor scales and their modes.

Specialist Guitar Skills Certificate Program

If you are serious about studying guitar and taking your playing to the next level, you must possess not just a command of chords and scales but an understanding of improvisation and how to express depth and feeling. This certificate program, taught by Berklee’s world-renowned guitar faculty, enables you to develop your guitar technique and hone your skills in any style, from rock, jazz, and country to metal, blues, and beyond. Upon completion, you’ll be able to recreate parts played by your guitar heroes—but more importantly, you’ll be better able to realize your own unique sound.

Master Guitar Certificate Program

From rock to jazz or folk to metal, what separates the great guitarists from the rest is their mastery of the skills taught in this program. From basics like chords and scales to nuances like improvisation techniques, form, control, and inflexion, this certificate program will take your guitar playing to the next level. Few accomplished guitarists have reached their peak alone, and Berklee’s faculty is unparalleled when it comes to delivering the personalized instruction and feedback that will help you turn the fretboard into a playground packed with unlimited possibilities.

Jazz Guitar 101

Study the styles of some of the most influential jazz guitarists, and learn the basics behind the jazz language: chord/scale usage, building melodic tension, and improvisation techniques.

Improve your command of the guitar by mastering the essential scales and their fingerings. This reference will help you play scales up, down, and across the fingerboard, in all keys. You will learn multiple scale fingering options to suit different musical contexts. Practice exercises will help you build your muscle memory as you play different fingering patterns across the strings, and then expand them to three octaves.

Graphical illustrations, exercises, and etudes will help reinforce all the most useful scale types. Traditional notation and tablature are included.

This material builds on the scale fingering concepts first introduced in A Modern Method for Guitar by William Leavitt, the author’s mentor. These concepts have been a foundational part of the renowned guitar curriculum at Berklee College of Music for many decades.

You will learn to:

Organize and understand the guitar fingerboard
Play melodies, improvise, and sight-read
Play scale types including major, minor (natural, harmonic, melodic/jazz), pentatonic, blues, modes, whole-tone, diminished, and chromatic
Practice strategies for learning scales in multiple fingering patterns, in all keys, expanding range, as well as using interval-based approaches
Practice etudes using scales in musical contexts

Larry Baione is a guitarist, educator, and author. He is chair of the Guitar Department at Berklee College of Music, where he has taught thousands of guitarists since 1974.

“With the unparalleled gravitas of a lifetime of performance and pedagogy at the epicenter of jazz guitar studies, Larry Baione has presented A Modern Method for Guitar Scales with exactly the clarity and efficiency this essential subject demands. Guitar is the most deceptively complex of instruments, and it requires a modern approach to traditional basic rudiments. There are no shortcuts around this material. With this method book, Larry has made it accessible, precise, and comprehensive.”

—Howard Paul, Jazz Guitarist and President/CEO of Benedetto Guitars

“This is a great and comprehensive book by a great player and teacher. Larry Baione has put together a beautiful and informative book that breaks everything down in a clear way. Only someone with years of teaching experience understands students and how they can best grapple with this information. I recommend it wholeheartedly!”

—Peter Bernstein, Guitarist