Originally Posted by: Caliko
I know a guy who has never learnt any of this and just knows where to put his fingers instinctively. He says he developed it just by figuring songs out by ear. Would that be the way to go?

I'm going to have to call BS on that ;). I don't think it's possible to take up playing guitar and not know about scales in at most a few months. Either he's a genius, or he learned some scales.

I learned the pentatonic blues scale first, pretty basic and easy to learn (probably due to it consisting of only 6 notes). Now I'm picking up the major scale (sorry for the inaccuracy to all you theory buffs, probably ionian?). What I've found is it's really easy to learn the major scale after learning the pentatonic because you basically just add a few notes. I would suggest suggest learning each position of the pentatonic first, as this will probably be the most applicable scale you use if you play blues/rock/country.