Scales & Arpeggios

This guitar lesson provides 10 easy exercises for understanding the relationship between the Melodic Minor Scale and altered dominant seventh chords. This is a free course (or give what you want) with a printable PDF with tab/standard notation and a YouTube short video. 

This short tutorial provides an effective warm-up exercise for guitar players of all styles and all levels. It comes with a YouTube short video with tab / notation overlayed and a downloadable PDF available for free on the GUMROAD STORE.

This guitar lesson lists 25 exotic and rare scales from different cultures and countries to add new colors to your playing.

You'll find two-octave guitar shapes, formula charts, audio files in the key of C for each scale and classified into five main categories :

Seven Note Dominant Scales.

Seven Note Minor Scales.

Seven Note Major Scales.

Six Note Scales.

Five Note Scales.

This free guitar lesson for beginners provides an easy exercise with tab/score and video for practicing the Bebop Dominant Scale. The free related PDF is available at the end of the lesson.

Quartal harmony is the way of building chords with intervals of fourths instead of thirds, it's a nice way to modernize and enrich your jazz guitar playing. This post provides an easy exercise for a first approach of quartal playing that is to arpeggiate three-note chords built in fourths, starting on each step of a major scale.

As is the case in many lessons on the website, you'll find a short YouTube video and the link to download the PDF for free, a little further in this article.

This exercise is the third of the serie covering ninth arpeggio practice around the cycle of fourths on guitar. While the previous two lessons dealt with major ninth and dominant ninth arpeggios, this one is about minor ninth arpeggios. As usual you'll find the related PDF transcription for free, here in the GUMROAD STORE.

Hexatonic scales are made of six notes, even if you can get them from any pentatonic scale (by adding one note) or diatonic scale (by removing one note).

The most popular are the blues scales (major, minor), the augmented scale, the whole-tone scale, the tritone scale and the Prometheus scale.

This guitar lesson with formula charts and diagrams covers them in details and will you help to better figure them out.

This blog post provides a guitar lesson implying a basic jazz line, built with notes from the Ionian mode (major scale), harmonized and transposed in halftone steps. Once again you'll find the free PDF of the lesson transcribed in tab / standard notation in the GUMROAD SHOP and also the related Youtube short video at the bottom.

A new free lesson is available for download (or Give What You Want) in Jazz Guitar Lick's GUMROAD store. It's a 24-bar study involving the same major 9th arpeggio pattern following the cycle of fourths. This exercise is a good way to warm-up, untie the fingers and develop the musical ear.

In this guitar lesson with shapes, tab, video and analysis you will learn how to use seventh arpeggios over important jazz chord sequences as minor & major II V , major II V I and I vi ii V progressions.

You'll find the link to the PDF at the bottom of the page.

This short jazz guitar study with tab, score and chord charts provides some easy jazz lines to apply over three common chord progressions found in jazz. These licks will help you better understand what scales and modes can be used over basic chord changes. You'll find a link to the free PDF at the end of this lesson.

Here is 12-bar jazz-blues study in Bb with guitar tab and standard notation mixing basic jazz chords and minor blues scale fragments. You'll find it for free (or Pay What You Want) on jazz-guitar-licks Gumroad store.

A new guitar poster referencing the most used arpeggios shapes is available on Jazz Guitar Licks Teespring Store. This reference chart includes 50 diagrams to help guitarists figure out arpeggio positions all over the guitar neck. The size of this poster is 24 x 36 inches (60 x 90 cm), the arpeggio types covered are:

• Major 7
• Minor 7
• Dominant 7
• Half-diminished
• Diminished 7
• Minor Major 7
• Augmented Major 7
• Augmented 7

This cheat sheet show how the modes of the major scale are built and what is the relation between them.

Arpeggios are the backbone of jazz improvisation, they are simple to learn, they allow to easily outline the harmony and create fluid lines.

Arpeggios are very popular in all styles of music (rock, metal, blues, pop), that's why it is very important to learn them.

This guitar lesson provides the most important arpeggio shapes that any beginner jazz guitarist must know, classified this way :

major 7, minor 7, dominant 7, half-diminished, diminished 7, Major 7#5 and minMaj7.

You'll find in this tutorial three kinds of guitar diagrams for each arpeggio type :

one-octave shapes (notes within the space of one octave), two-octave shapes (notes within two octaves) and CAGED shapes.

This cheat sheet is a guitar chart containing 12 shapes that show the main dominant scales used in jazz music (Mixolydian, Lydian dominant, Mixolydian b9, Mixolydian b13, dominant bebop, Phrygian dominant).