I’ve been working on the idea for this video for a few months. It started as a reaction to one of Rick Beato’s livestreamed “the ultimate guitar fretboard crash course” videos. I love Rick’s interviews and song analysis, but his crash course video left me wondering if I could do better.
I challenged myself to explain how to learn 15 scales across the entire fretboard in 15 minutes. I ended up covering 14 scales and three arpeggios in 15:15, which I think is pretty good! This is exactly how I think about scales when I’m improvising, and it’s definitely how I’d go about learning them from scratch if I was starting over.
The video covers these scales and arpeggios:
- Minor pentatonic
- Major pentatonic
- Minor blues
- Major blues
- Minor hexatonic
- Ionian mode
- Dorian mode
- Phrygian mode
- Lydian mode
- Mixolydian mode
- Aeolian mode
- Harmonic minor
- Melodic minor
- Phrygian dominant
- Minor triad arpeggios
- Major triad arpeggios
- Dominant 7 arpeggios
It’s a lot of scales, but they require surprisingly little memorization once you understand the method, which is based on my rectangle and stack visualization technique. There’s an accompanying 18-page PDF version available on Patreon with all the diagrams.
Fret Science 