Question:
I am a beginning guitar player. Actually I'm not a total novice to music theory, I am coming from a clarinet and jazz saxophone background. So I understand circle of fifths, etc. Somewhere in college I learned the simple pattern based on the E bar chord, and some basic stuff. Recently I bought a book by Don Latarski on scales and modes, and am trying to make sense of it. There appear to be 2 major scale patterns - why would you learn one over the other. This may seem like sort of a stupid question, but on sax there is only ONE pattern that will work, and that's the one you learn. It seems like on guitar there are thousands of different patterns you could be playing, which makes it exciting yet difficult to learn.
Answer:
You've discovered the really difficult aspect of linear guitar playing. The same exact note can appear in up to four different places on the guitar, unlike on saxophone where there's only one middle C. What this means is that with every note you have to make a decision as to where to play it. Then, once you've done that, you have to make a decision about which way you're going to go to get to the next note. Say you want to play two notes, A then B. (Assume I'm talking about the A in the lowest octave of the guitar and the B a whole step above that). In this octave, you could play the A note as the open 5th string, or on the 5th fret of the 6th string. So, you have to make that decision. Let's say you choose the 5th fret. Now, you have to choose which way you're going to go to get the B. The two most logical choices would be to go back to the 2nd fret of the 5th string, or go up 2 frets on the same string. Now, you see, with every single new note, you have to make this decision. So, it just multiplies and multiplies in terms of these little positioning decisions. The more fingerings you learn, the more this becomes second nature. Hopefully, you can see that if you wanted to play a line of, say, twelve notes, you have to make a huge number of fingering decisions, whereas with saxophone, each of the notes has one definite place it is supposed to be played. This is the aspect of guitar that is difficult. It's also the reason why it's very difficult to be a good sight reader on guitar, while it's comparatively easy on saxophone. These little split second fingering choices that constantly need to be made slow down the process a lot. The easy aspect of guitar, however, is that any one fingering that you choose can be moved up and down the neck to fit different keys. The saxophone is harder in this respect because every single key requires a different fingering. I'd suggest that you check out Jimmy Bruno's book on scale fingerings. There are many more than two fingerings for each scale by the way. It seems that most people accept six basic two octave fingerings. Three starting on the sixth string, and three starting on the fifth string. Then there's certainly more than that, but six is a pretty good foundation to work with. Check out Jimmy's book.
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