Ok. You have listened to the track.
The track goes at a relatively slow pace for the scales but if you need to go slower which you probably will.
Start by playing to a metronome to a consistent pulse playing these scales back to back and naming your notes.
Once you feel comfortable with that, move to the track.
What the track is doing it is basically having you play through each one of these scales twice.
Then you move on to the next string.
You play once ascending which is up.
You play once descending which is down.
Then you do that again and then you move to the next string. That is how the track is structured.
You will hear chords behind you. The chords are there to reinforce the transitions you are making with the scale.
The reason this is a good exercise is because it helps you hear what the notes sound like in the context of a musical example.
At the end of this lesson by the time you have worked through this you should have a good understanding of
the notes on the guitar, they way they relate to the fret board
and the way they relate to the musical notation in terms of connecting the tablature, musical notation and fret board.
You should also get a good idea of what it means to play single note lines over a musical idea or over a track.
We have already done it with chords.
This is your first chance to do it with a single pick line.
A note about picking.
When you are picking in a musical situation. In this setting it is not too big of a deal but as we speed things up
and as you learn different lines you will need to develop a technique called alternate picking.
We have already gone over how to hold the pick.
Alternate picking is going to be is instead of just strumming down on every note.
We will go to this 6th string E major scale to demonstrate.
Instead of picking down every note you are going to alternate every other note down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.
This action should come from your wrist and the movement of your fingers.
Not your arm.
You want to have as little motion as possible happening so you do not hit the other strings.
When you are alternate picking it can be really easy to hit some of the other strings.
Especially when you pick up speed and start moving from string to string.
You want to make sure that you are muting with this portion of your hand, the strings below the ones that you are picking.
When I say the strings below I do not mean below in terms of gravity.
I mean below in terms of the lower strings versus higher strings.
So if I am playing my G string I am going to be resting this portion of my hand on my E string, A string and D string.
You can still hear that G string ringing but the rest of them are muted
so that if I accidentally hit them while I am picking through a line they don't ring out and make the sound messy.
Hopefully as you go through this lesson and the materials and the track you will have a better understanding of the way
musical notation relates to tablature, relates to the fret board and learning your notes on the fret board.
Stay tuned for the next lesson.
We will be talking about basic minor chord forms and bar chords.