Guitar Scale Lesson - The Lydian Dominant Scale

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The Lydian Dominant Scale

Although I definitely think it's a good idea to focus a lot of your time on mastering the basic guitar scales, it can be really fun investing some of your practice time on learning more exotic scales. These more advanced guitar scales will often help you to add more interest and variety to your improvised or composed guitar solos.

Introduction To The Lydian Dominant Scale

In this guitar lesson we'll be taking a look at one of my favorite guitar scales...the Lydian Dominant scale.

This cool sounding scale is also called the overtone scale and can be easily constructed by taking the major scale and doing the following...

Change the 4 to a #4.
Change the 7 to a b7.

Please check out the example below to see what I mean...

A Major Scale: Scale Degrees = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

A Major Scale

To turn the A Major scale into the A Lydian Dominant scale we have to do the following...

Raise the D to a D#.
Lower the G# to a G.

A Lydian Dominant Scale: Scale Degrees = 1 2 3 #4 5 6 b7

Learning The Lydian Dominant Scale On The Guitar

Let's now look at a really useful three-note-per-string fingering for the A Lydian Dominant scale...

A Lydian Dominant Guitar Scale

Please take a few minutes now to memorize the above fingering. Once you've done that, then you're ready to start working on the following exercises...

Exercise 1: Scale Played Straight-Up-And-Down

Lydian Dominant Exercise 1

Exercise 2: Melodic Pattern 1

A Lydian Dominant Scale - Melodic Pattern 1

Exercise 3: Melodic Pattern 2

A Lydian Dominant Scale - Melodic Pattern 2

Where To Use The Lydian Dominant Scale

I often use the Lydian Dominant scale over dominant 7th chords (1 3 5 b7). So if I wanted to solo over an A Dominant 7th chord, I would use the A Lydian Dominant scale.

Here is an A Dominant 7th backing track for you to download...

A Dominant 7th Backing Track (Download and save this mp3 to your computer)

I recommend having the backing track playing as you practice the exercises above. This will allow you to hear what the scale sounds like over the chord it is used over. This is a fantastic way of doing ear training while you are practicing scales.

Important Tip For Guitar Scale Mastery Members:

If you are a paid member of Guitar Scale Mastery you can find many of these backing tracks in the member's area. Just login to the members area and look at the section called Guitar Scale Activators.

They are a very valuable tool for your scale practice...so be sure that you use them! (I almost always practice my scales with one of these backing tracks playing in the background).

A great place to start learning to use the A Lydian Dominant scale would be on a 12-bar blues in the key of A. (Google it if you don't know what a 12-bar blues is)...

For Example: You could use the A Lydian Dominant scale anytime the blues progression hits the A7 chord. (You might get some dirty looks though if you're jamming with die-hard traditional blues musicians. Why? Because it sounds a bit weird and jazzy!).

A Few Final Words

I hope you enjoyed this quick introduction to the Lydian Dominant scale. In a future guitar lesson I'll be showing you some licks and ideas that use this scale.

But for now, just focus on learning and practicing the three exercises we covered in this lesson. They will lay a good foundation for getting to know the sound of this scale.

All the best,

Craig Bassett.