Learning to Love Every Genre of Music: A Guitar Teacher’s Guide

Often when I speak with students they will tell me of their love of a certain genre.  As a guitar teacher generally, but not always, I hear “classic rock” or “blues”, “indie” or “acoustic”.  These are fantastic genres of music and as a guitar teacher I love teaching students to play within them.

There are often genres, however that I believe can actually add flavour to your playing that may be less popular.  The reason they tend to be less popular is because they use scales less familiar or friendly as those of the genres mentioned above.

Rock and heavy metal depend a lot on the pentatonic scale – the favoured scale of most musicians because of its versatility.  It’s an easy 5 note scale (you can add the 6th note (b4th/#5th if you’re feeling adventurous – it’s called the blues scale).  Either way the pentatonic/blues scale is fairly straight forward to use and will play nicely over most genres. 

The less familiar scales include the modes (Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian & Locrian) and other altered scales like the harmonic minor (#7) and the melodic minor (#6th & #7th ascending before naturalising on the descending scale).  There are others like the bebop scale and even the straight major and natural minor scales.

Often these can be used well over jazz or within genre fusions.  What I mean by that are genres like blues/latin and heavy metal/funk.  Rage Against The Machine are great at doing heavy metal/funk really well with Tom Morello grinding it out on the guitar.  Carlos Santana does an excellent job of mixing blues and latin together on the regular. There are so many mixed genres that will better you as a lead player.

As a guitar teacher in Aberdeen my job is to focus in on these less familiar but equally as powerful genres.  I believe you will be a better player if you learn to play and memorise the scales that are required to play within these fusions.

As players we never stop learning, it’s our job to keep the ear of the listener (including our own ear) guessing.  We want to create melodies and harmonies that are constantly different and interesting to listen to.  It’s our job to constantly push our own playing so we don’t get bored of sticking to the same old stuff.

Push the boundaries, listen to genres out with your comfort zone and you’ll go far – FACT!