Scale Mastery Book Review

By: Matthew Warnock

Click to Buy Scale Mastery

Scale books for guitarists seem to be hitting shelves in record numbers these days. With the evolution of the ebook, there has been a boom of self-published books being released, providing more options for guitar consumers than ever before. Because of these myriad options, it seems like a great time to be a guitarist, because of the wide variety of teaching materials available. But, at the same time it’s harder than ever to decide which product is worth buying, especially when money is tight.

Josh Sager, owner and operator of www.freterverse.com, has recently entered the scale ebook world with the release of his first book Scale Mastery. The book is a welcomed addition to the guitar pedagogical library as it provides solid information for the reader, but does it in a different and informative way. By taking a few chances with the material and how it’s presented, Sager has created a book that not only provides exercises and theoretical background about the material presented, but does it in a way that guitarists who have worked through many other scale books will find fresh and intriguing.

Right off the bat, Sager marks his book as being different from the norm with the choice of the scale he uses in the musical examples throughout the book. Normally, readers will see a C major scale, or A minor pentatonic scale, something common and easy to play on the guitar. But, Sager challenges the reader to explore new territory by using the EmMaj7(#4) scale, an exotic scale that will not be familiar to most guitarists that check out this book.

By choice an outside the box scale for his examples, Sager is ensuring that readers will be able to work through each exercise throughout the book with a new scale, allowing them to learn new material and new techniques along the way. A lot of the time scale books use a common scale, such as C major, which can become boring after a few exercises. In this case, the sound of the odd scale choice will keeps things interesting from start to finish as readers work through the different exercises and concepts presented in each chapter of the book.

These exercises include harmonizing the scale, playing the scale on one string or two strings at a time, improvising, modes, intervals, arpeggios, octave displacement and much more. By covering a wide variety of topics related to learning scales, Sager has ensured that readers of all levels and backgrounds will find something to enjoy and learn while going through the book. Some of these exercises will be review for more experienced players, but others will be new, so even those players who have gone through other scale teaching material will find enjoyment in working through Scale Mastery.

Overall, Scale Mastery is a welcomed addition to the guitar learning library. It is difficult in these times to write and release a guitar learning method that takes a new and fresh look at learning material on the instrument, especially scales, and this book provides just that experience. Hats off to Sager for taking some chances and succeeding on every front.