How Practicing Scales On Guitar Improves Your Technique: When you work on scales with the goal of improving your guitar technique, it is important to focus on very specific elements that make such an improvement in your technique possible: economy of motion, tension control, 2 hand coordination and articulation of the pick. Notice the important difference between practicing scales while concentrating on specific elements of your guitar technique vs. Monotonous repetition of finger motions that most guitarists go through. It is this difference that allows the mind to tell your hands what to do in order to learn to play guitar at a higher level.
How Practicing Scales On Guitar Makes You Better At Improvising: When it comes to improvising, playing scales on guitar is obviously only one of many elements that needs to be practiced, however in order to improvise freely and creatively, you MUST go through the process of becoming accurate at playing the scales needed for your musical style. One practice method to achieve this goal requires you to work on mastering each shape of a particular scale individually by improvising ONLY in that scale shape over a backing track (while switching to a different shape of the same scale every few minutes). There are many more possible ways of using scales to grow as an improviser, but the idea is to illustrate how your attention is being directed on a very precise goal (when practicing scales to improve as a soloist) versus working on scales to improve other aspects of your guitar playing.
How Practicing Scales On Guitar Helps You Learn The Guitar Neck Better: When you work on learning the guitar neck with scales, you need to pay more attention to how the scale shapes form visual patterns that occur all over the fretboard. In this case, less attention is needed to be paid to what your hands are doing and all efforts must be directed on memorizing how every scale pattern will look in your mind before your hands touch the guitar. When you focus in this way, it will be impossible for your fingers to mindlessly go through the motions of practicing and your fretboard visualization skills will have no choice but to improve.
How Practicing Scales On Guitar Will Make You A More Creative Musician: One effective way to become a more creative guitar player when practicing scales is to work on coming up with new sequences and phrases from scale shapes that you are practicing. Instead of merely playing the notes of the scale up and down in a boring way, this will require your mind to think in innovative ways that you don't normally do when doing regular guitar practicing. This is yet another way of how scales can be used to grow a certain element of your musical skills by directing your attention to a very specific mini goal. So far in this article I have given you examples of how you can use a single guitar exercise to grow in a variety of elements of your musicianship. By choosing where to focus your attention in a guitar practice session, you can achieve a variety of objectives. Its important to mention that these general approaches can be used with ANY exercise that you practice on guitar (and aren't limited to only scales) in order to refine any musical skill that you think of. The more you do this, the more you will realize that your guitar playing progress isn't affected by "the exercises" you practice on guitar, but rather by HOW you practice whatever it is you are working on. In order to get the most out of this approach to practicing guitar, divide your attention to working on a unique "daily goal" during each day of practicing. This will enable you to cover everything without trying to cram too many things into each guitar practice session. For instance, set a specific goal for an item such as scales for Monday's practice session, then work on scales with a different focus on Tuesday and continue in this way through the week. One last point I want to make about this general approach to practicing guitar is that having a lot of exercises is NOT a bad thing in and of itself. In fact, multiple exercises are often necessary for more productive practicing, but it is still critical for you to learn how to get maximum value from only a single practice item. After you begin to practice guitar with this mindset, your rate of progress will skyrocket and you will amaze yourself by how much faster you will move towards your guitar playing goals.
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