Exotic Scales For Guitar Pt.1 – Japanese Scales

By Carl Brown | March 18, 2012 |


This free video guitar lesson will introduce you to the incredible sound of exotic scales on the guitar.

You can hear this type of playing in players from Marty Friedman and Jason Becker to many jazz guitar greats.

In this video guitar lesson I will show you 5 different scales that comes from Japan. These exotic sounding scales can sound very unique and beautiful when used in the proper context. You will also find many of them contain quite a bit of dissonance which helps shake things up a bit with your creativity and sense of melody.

All of these Japanese scales are a subset of the pentatonic scale. They all contain only 5 tones each. It is important for you to create your won pentatonic scale shapes using the scale formulas for any of the scales that you like the sound of. The TAB PDF that comes with this lesson will have a complete scale formula breakdown for each scale. Grab the TAB PDF below.

Exotic Scales Pt.1 TAB PDF Download

You can even use some of your familiar two notes per string pentatonic licks using these scales instead to REALLY give your improvisations a quick boost.

Enjoy! Carl..

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Exotic Scales For Guitar Pt.1 (Japanese Scales)

Posted in Advanced Guitar Lessons, Intermediate Guitar Lessons and tagged , , , , ,

6 Comments

  1. Paul Remigio on March 18, 2012 at 9:54 pm

    Very awesome lesson!! This shows that your not partial to any style in your teachings. Take care and Keep up the lessons!!!

  2. Kenneth on March 21, 2012 at 1:32 am

    Thank you very much, that was an interesting lesson, I love to try to blend in some “exotic” stuff in my solo’s and you’ve given me a load of ideas in this one. Thank you for taking the time and share all these AWESOME lessons .. thanks //Ken

  3. Marc Leone on March 22, 2012 at 7:39 am

    Very Cool. Thanks for all your efforts!

  4. Jr Enriquez on July 28, 2013 at 9:27 am

    Cool guy,Carl! my guitar playing has changed since i first saw your videos!!you have a lot of followers here in our contry phillippines keep it up!

  5. Søren Larsen on June 18, 2015 at 11:02 am

    Sounds kinda like something Josh Homme would play in some leads

  6. james fairs on December 6, 2018 at 9:31 pm

    Carl: this is a cool Pacific breeze in a sea of pentatonic shredding (!)

    – – –

    I’ll add delays, create some chordal derivations, find some standard changes to throw in as a surprise …
    Made my day: nice job!

    (James Fairs)

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