4 ms·

Uhh, as a guitar player, let me just say that I hate scales. I know that they are a necessary-evil to learn if you want to learn how to solo, figure out chord s

Uhh, as a guitar player, let me just say that I hate scales. I know that they are a necessary-evil to learn if you want to learn how to solo, figure out chord structure, etc. But the whole thing sounds as fishy to me as someone saying you want to learn programming, learn Theory of Computation/Turing Machine etc. Perfecting the scale and learning it at faster clip, to me is a good warm-up routine and gets your fingers fast enough to be able to play really fast licks. But to play and improvise good music, you just have to play. You don't learn how to hack via Turing Machines; you learn about Turing Machines after you spend long enough time hacking around, that the theoretical stuff becomes obvious to you after awhile. Same thing with music and language, you can pour over the grammar and the circle of fifths you whole life and never be able to play/speak fluently until you immerse yourself in the idioms & the rhythm and just play what you know sounds right and not play what you know sounds wrong, naturally.

cj 16y ago
Coming from someone who has taken piano lessons for 3+ years and never bothered to learn scales, I can attest that scales have not become obvious to me. Piano is different than guitar because (from my limited knowledge) guitar songs are mostly based on chords while on the piano the chords are often broken up into individual notes, eliminating the need to memorize/remember specific chords/scales.
- Andys 16y ago
  Another piano player here. My take is that you don't need scales to enjoy music. But you will also never be at the level of the greats.
  - tumblen 16y ago
    I mentioned this briefly in the post, but I think this logic, again, puts scales on a pedestal. I don't want to be a great pianist, I just want to be decent at expressing myself in musical form. For awhile, I thought this meant scales weren't really for me. It turns out that, on the contrary, they are ideal for me because they quickly get me up to speed on what tends to sound good. Ultimately, you're right, but scales may be worth a glance even if you're somewhere in the middle!
    - alaithea 16y ago
      If you really enjoy getting to the heart of "what sounds good," you would probably enjoy adding more music theory to your study. Make sure not to stop at scales, and move on to intervals, chords, and the circle of fifths. :) Eventually, instead of just the "what" of what sounds good, you start learning the "why."
      - tumblen 16y ago
        Hey, absolutely! Actually, I started learning chords prior to scales. And only wrote about scales because they seemed to be the meta-skill that many others are derived from. I'm still figuring out how precisely the circle of fifths is useful, someone feel free to chime in.
- alaithea 16y ago
  Without first-hand knowledge of the benefit you could get from playing scales, I'm not sure what you're attesting to. You've managed to get along without them. That's fine. It might not make a noticeable difference after a few years of playing, but if you keep going, there are technical holes in your muscle memory which you don't even realize you have, which scales would help fill. (It's this way for everyone, BTW.) I still get benefit from scales after 25 years, and actually enjoy them much of the time-- when they're savored and played in fun patterns. The time to play scales in piano practice can be a lot like the meditation portion of a yoga routine. On the other hand, if you're just playing "for fun," and aren't hitting any major technical frustration points, then whatever. Keep having fun. Just remember that if you start to not have fun, there are "icky" things like scales which can help you keep advancing. Scales can begin to help at any point in one's musical life.
- BrianHV 16y ago
  Piano and guitar are more similar than you think. A lot of guitar music, especially on the net, is written just as chords, which may be what you're thinking of. But the chords are the same notes whether you're playing them on guitar or piano. You could play exactly the same thing on piano as the guitar players do, and aside from sounding a little stiff, would make good musical sense. It's also common in pop and jazz for piano players to read off chord sheets (lead sheets). Likewise, guitar music can be written out note-by-note just as piano music generally is. Classical guitar music is written this way, as well as rock leads. Here's the thing about it, though. If you're thinking of it as individual notes, you're doing it the hard way. Scales and chords are a form of compression between the page and your brain, just as gzip is a form of compression between the web server and your browser. Once you figure them out, you can look at a measure and know what keys you need to hit without having to look at each note individually. Playing any instrument becomes much more fun once you have that skill.
ehsanul 16y ago
I agree with your overall point. However.. I know that they are a necessary-evil to learn if you want to learn how to solo, figure out chord structure, etc. But the whole thing sounds as fishy to me as someone saying you want to learn programming, learn Theory of Computation/Turing Machine etc. As another guitarist, I find that knowing scales let's me more easily noodle around and make stuff that sounds good. At this point, it's really just muscle memory, and I don't have to actually think about the scale much, I just intuitively know that putting my finger in a particular position will bring in a particular sound. Even when using all sorts of altered tunings, I can adapt quickly enough by mapping out scales I want to use. But that wouldn't be possible now if I hadn't learned about scales early on, and had some understanding of how they worked, however minor. The programming analog might be learning how to write your own functions rather than than simply copy-pasting (ie, composing music yourself instead of just learning songs others have made).
tumblen 16y ago
I wrote the article posted and until I had the experiences I wrote about in it, I would have agreed with you 100%. I believe that doing always beats theory. If, however, one is open to injecting a small amount of theory into their doing, it can be quite powerful. My goal with the article, and in general, is to reduce the barrier of entry on topics like 'music theory' that seem hard but really aren't. I've gotten a few friends on the piano and said "Here, just mess around on these notes and see how it sounds." When it didn't sound like garbage, it felt like magic to them, but it was just scales. This simple example made them significantly more interested in piano and the fundamentals of music. Why do we obfuscate these topics and hold them back from otherwise capable people? If we can find a way to integrate a small and specifically relevant amount of theory into our 'just doing', I think it only adds to the experience.
jerf 16y ago
Instead of imagining performing music as a series of notes coming at you, A C G B A, imagine it as a series of motions: A-C, C-G, G-B, B-A. The purpose of a technical exercise like a scale is to put those motions into your muscle memory, so your conscious mind is no longer thinking about them. Scales should not be the only exercises you do; I do not play guitar, but a piano player should certainly also do arpeggios, circle-of-fifths, "circle of thirds" (rolling up major and minor scales by thirds, also going up and down the keyboard in pure major and minor thirds. there's also some good multi-finger exercises you should do to, like scales+fifths, and some genres really call for yet other technical exercises). I don't know what the guitar equivalents would be but I am sure there are some. Unfortunately, the only way to put something into muscle memory is with repetition... endless, endless repetition. Alas. (No sarcasm.) It is absolutely true that you can play without this, but instead of a powerful set of abstractions stuck in your muscle memory, you will have a patchy set of whatever you happened to need. Which, on average, due to the uneven need for them, will indeed correspond to most of what you need. But you will have holes compared to someone who is doing the full set, and the further you try to go the more those holes will bite you. I say this without judgment. Far be it from me to condemn somebody for learning an instrument and choosing not to devote the time to become an utterly awesome expert. I think it's a perfectly viable choice to choose to become pretty decent. But you should know what you are doing. It is not at all like needing to know Turing Machines to know how to program. It is much more like (though not identical to) needing to know how to type fluently to program; if you're hunting around for the open parenthesis, you're not programming. This metaphor breaks down because your editor will wait for you to find the key, at worst it breaks your flow; when playing music if you come up against a missing muscle routine you just failed something. (Incidentally, when I put it this way it seems obvious, but for all the music training I've had and for all the various instruments I've learned or at least poked at, nobody has ever put it this way to me. It's too easy to insist that it's simply tradition, or to start babbling about some semi-mystical thing or other, when really it's quite simple: you can't play at a high level, or even a middling level, with your conscious mind. The vast bulk of your instrument-playing routines need to live in the cerebellum. It's that simple. It's not merely because it's tradition and there are concrete and simple reasons why technical exercises are necessary, appeals to authority are unnecessary.)
- 16y ago
mreid 16y ago
I'm also a guitarist. I mainly play folk, rock and classical but recently started seriously delving into jazz guitar. I never used to think much of practising scales but I now find their connection with chord construction fascinating. Knowing exactly where a note is in a scale without having to think much about it is a real eye-opener. Regarding your programming analogy, I think of it slightly differently -- scales : playing :: touch-typing : programming. Sure, you don't need it but it will make you a more efficient coder if you don't always have to look at the keys. Another view is that learning scales is a way of compiling a whole lot of low-level muscle knowledge so you can think and play at a higher level of abstraction. You don't always think about programming in terms of Turing machines because languages hide that level of detail. I agree with your last point though: you do need immersion and an "ear" to play well. However, practising technique and learning theory are not mutually exclusive. For example, learning a language is easier if you study some grammar as it gives you useful concepts for processing the spoken language you hear while immersed.

cj 16y ago

Coming from someone who has taken piano lessons for 3+ years and never bothered to learn scales, I can attest that scales have not become obvious to me. Piano is different than guitar because (from my limited knowledge) guitar songs are mostly based on chords while on the piano the chords are often broken up into individual notes, eliminating the need to memorize/remember specific chords/scales.

Andys 16y ago
Another piano player here. My take is that you don't need scales to enjoy music. But you will also never be at the level of the greats.
- tumblen 16y ago
  I mentioned this briefly in the post, but I think this logic, again, puts scales on a pedestal. I don't want to be a great pianist, I just want to be decent at expressing myself in musical form. For awhile, I thought this meant scales weren't really for me. It turns out that, on the contrary, they are ideal for me because they quickly get me up to speed on what tends to sound good. Ultimately, you're right, but scales may be worth a glance even if you're somewhere in the middle!
  - alaithea 16y ago
    If you really enjoy getting to the heart of "what sounds good," you would probably enjoy adding more music theory to your study. Make sure not to stop at scales, and move on to intervals, chords, and the circle of fifths. :) Eventually, instead of just the "what" of what sounds good, you start learning the "why."
    - tumblen 16y ago
      Hey, absolutely! Actually, I started learning chords prior to scales. And only wrote about scales because they seemed to be the meta-skill that many others are derived from. I'm still figuring out how precisely the circle of fifths is useful, someone feel free to chime in.
alaithea 16y ago
Without first-hand knowledge of the benefit you could get from playing scales, I'm not sure what you're attesting to. You've managed to get along without them. That's fine. It might not make a noticeable difference after a few years of playing, but if you keep going, there are technical holes in your muscle memory which you don't even realize you have, which scales would help fill. (It's this way for everyone, BTW.) I still get benefit from scales after 25 years, and actually enjoy them much of the time-- when they're savored and played in fun patterns. The time to play scales in piano practice can be a lot like the meditation portion of a yoga routine. On the other hand, if you're just playing "for fun," and aren't hitting any major technical frustration points, then whatever. Keep having fun. Just remember that if you start to not have fun, there are "icky" things like scales which can help you keep advancing. Scales can begin to help at any point in one's musical life.
BrianHV 16y ago
Piano and guitar are more similar than you think. A lot of guitar music, especially on the net, is written just as chords, which may be what you're thinking of. But the chords are the same notes whether you're playing them on guitar or piano. You could play exactly the same thing on piano as the guitar players do, and aside from sounding a little stiff, would make good musical sense. It's also common in pop and jazz for piano players to read off chord sheets (lead sheets). Likewise, guitar music can be written out note-by-note just as piano music generally is. Classical guitar music is written this way, as well as rock leads. Here's the thing about it, though. If you're thinking of it as individual notes, you're doing it the hard way. Scales and chords are a form of compression between the page and your brain, just as gzip is a form of compression between the web server and your browser. Once you figure them out, you can look at a measure and know what keys you need to hit without having to look at each note individually. Playing any instrument becomes much more fun once you have that skill.

ehsanul 16y ago

I agree with your overall point. However.. I know that they are a necessary-evil to learn if you want to learn how to solo, figure out chord structure, etc. But the whole thing sounds as fishy to me as someone saying you want to learn programming, learn Theory of Computation/Turing Machine etc. As another guitarist, I find that knowing scales let's me more easily noodle around and make stuff that sounds good. At this point, it's really just muscle memory, and I don't have to actually think about the scale much, I just intuitively know that putting my finger in a particular position will bring in a particular sound. Even when using all sorts of altered tunings, I can adapt quickly enough by mapping out scales I want to use. But that wouldn't be possible now if I hadn't learned about scales early on, and had some understanding of how they worked, however minor. The programming analog might be learning how to write your own functions rather than than simply copy-pasting (ie, composing music yourself instead of just learning songs others have made).

tumblen 16y ago

I wrote the article posted and until I had the experiences I wrote about in it, I would have agreed with you 100%. I believe that doing always beats theory. If, however, one is open to injecting a small amount of theory into their doing, it can be quite powerful. My goal with the article, and in general, is to reduce the barrier of entry on topics like 'music theory' that seem hard but really aren't. I've gotten a few friends on the piano and said "Here, just mess around on these notes and see how it sounds." When it didn't sound like garbage, it felt like magic to them, but it was just scales. This simple example made them significantly more interested in piano and the fundamentals of music. Why do we obfuscate these topics and hold them back from otherwise capable people? If we can find a way to integrate a small and specifically relevant amount of theory into our 'just doing', I think it only adds to the experience.

jerf 16y ago

Instead of imagining performing music as a series of notes coming at you, A C G B A, imagine it as a series of motions: A-C, C-G, G-B, B-A. The purpose of a technical exercise like a scale is to put those motions into your muscle memory, so your conscious mind is no longer thinking about them. Scales should not be the only exercises you do; I do not play guitar, but a piano player should certainly also do arpeggios, circle-of-fifths, "circle of thirds" (rolling up major and minor scales by thirds, also going up and down the keyboard in pure major and minor thirds. there's also some good multi-finger exercises you should do to, like scales+fifths, and some genres really call for yet other technical exercises). I don't know what the guitar equivalents would be but I am sure there are some. Unfortunately, the only way to put something into muscle memory is with repetition... endless, endless repetition. Alas. (No sarcasm.) It is absolutely true that you can play without this, but instead of a powerful set of abstractions stuck in your muscle memory, you will have a patchy set of whatever you happened to need. Which, on average, due to the uneven need for them, will indeed correspond to most of what you need. But you will have holes compared to someone who is doing the full set, and the further you try to go the more those holes will bite you. I say this without judgment. Far be it from me to condemn somebody for learning an instrument and choosing not to devote the time to become an utterly awesome expert. I think it's a perfectly viable choice to choose to become pretty decent. But you should know what you are doing. It is not at all like needing to know Turing Machines to know how to program. It is much more like (though not identical to) needing to know how to type fluently to program; if you're hunting around for the open parenthesis, you're not programming. This metaphor breaks down because your editor will wait for you to find the key, at worst it breaks your flow; when playing music if you come up against a missing muscle routine you just failed something. (Incidentally, when I put it this way it seems obvious, but for all the music training I've had and for all the various instruments I've learned or at least poked at, nobody has ever put it this way to me. It's too easy to insist that it's simply tradition, or to start babbling about some semi-mystical thing or other, when really it's quite simple: you can't play at a high level, or even a middling level, with your conscious mind. The vast bulk of your instrument-playing routines need to live in the cerebellum. It's that simple. It's not merely because it's tradition and there are concrete and simple reasons why technical exercises are necessary, appeals to authority are unnecessary.)

16y ago

mreid 16y ago

I'm also a guitarist. I mainly play folk, rock and classical but recently started seriously delving into jazz guitar. I never used to think much of practising scales but I now find their connection with chord construction fascinating. Knowing exactly where a note is in a scale without having to think much about it is a real eye-opener. Regarding your programming analogy, I think of it slightly differently -- scales : playing :: touch-typing : programming. Sure, you don't need it but it will make you a more efficient coder if you don't always have to look at the keys. Another view is that learning scales is a way of compiling a whole lot of low-level muscle knowledge so you can think and play at a higher level of abstraction. You don't always think about programming in terms of Turing machines because languages hide that level of detail. I agree with your last point though: you do need immersion and an "ear" to play well. However, practising technique and learning theory are not mutually exclusive. For example, learning a language is easier if you study some grammar as it gives you useful concepts for processing the spoken language you hear while immersed.