A Modern Method for Guitar Scales

Publisher: Berklee Press
Traditional notation and tablature are included.
Author: Larry Baione

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.

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.