Intermediate Guitar Scales Handbook by Graham Tippett

In this book, I’d like to show you what I discovered about teaching scales to intermediate guitarists, as well as the one thing that really made a difference to their ability to improvise in a musical way, rather than running aimlessly up and down CAGED shapes or 3NPS scale patterns.

I was always puzzled as to why players with a good grasp of pentatonics lost their way when they started to learn the major scale and its modes, or any other scale for that matter. I wanted to know, so I began to study how other instrumentalists learn scales and it suddenly dawned on me where guitarists were going wrong. What I noticed was that the way in which guitarists go about learning scales in the beginning is not only unmusical, but counterintuitive and counterproductive due to a combination of the scale shapes themselves and how they navigate the fretboard.

This book is aimed at high beginner to intermediate guitarists who are wondering where to go after pentatonic scales, but it’s also useful for anyone starting out with scales and will most likely save you years of wasted practice time in both cases.