Big Picture

Most of the lessons in this blog are designed for fairly advanced guitarists, and rather a lot of them have something to do with scales. I wanted to write something for what I call the Beginning Intermediate player, who's ready to start learning scales but isn't sure what the roadmap looks like. I hope this will also give you an idea of how I ordinarily approach this subject with students, although since evrybody's different and I don't have a one-size-fits-all "programme" there's bound to be lots of room for variation.

I ran across the How Music REALLY Works! site on the web today. I'm not one for knocking other people's work, and I mostly use this blog for practical lessons, but there's a myth repeated here that needs to be busted.

I'm going to assume you know how to actually read "tab", aka guitar TABlature. I'll be using a lot of tab on this site, so this post is here to explain my specific notation, because unfortunately the web is still amazingly bad at representing music of all kinds, including tab.