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I'm answering to you as I just finished my daily guitar practice, with stupid scales practice (triplet/reverse triplet/minor 7th flat five/pattern 1-5) and I st

I'm answering to you as I just finished my daily guitar practice, with stupid scales practice (triplet/reverse triplet/minor 7th flat five/pattern 1-5) and I still hate it. However I agree with you that practicing scales is excellent for building up your "typing" ability, whether it be on the guitar or on the piano to play fast licks. Same thing with the circle of fifth to identify which mode a particular song is in, and to be able identify which key/scale/chord you choose to solo on. But this is more philosophical than technical - you learn rules so that you can break them. Even scales are derived from other scales "hacked" into (diatonic => pentatonic scale, the "monkey-wrench" notes are what gives it a bluesy feel). Some songs have intentionally mismatched notes from a wrong scale that clash over a chord, to evoke an eerie feeling from the listener. Similarly, a performing musician never stops playing/strumming if he/she doesn't hit the right note or finger-down a whole entire chord, you keep going on. "There's never a wrong note, only a opportunity" - Miles Davis. Even if you are a straight-edge classical pianist, you have the artistic freedom to perform your piece with accents and timbre in the constraints of the tempo and melody of the sheet music. Similarly when you program, some people like to take time to define their interfaces and draw out the class diagrams to figure out how all of the pieces fit together. I personally, like to open up NotePad++ and start typing the first thing that comes to mind, and run compile, probably get a bunch of compile errors, so I go back and correct them and run compile again and get errors again, and so forth until I get one piece working, and I build off that piece the second piece. Sure you need to learn typing, before you program. I'm just saying that for someone who's motivated to express themselves, whether that be through programming or music, that motivation makes them get through the technical barrier, not that the other way around. tl;dr - Everyone has got a right to be wrong; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHVSptF3_G8&feature=avmsc2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHVSptF3_G8&feature=avmsc...

jerf 16y ago
My personality isn't really amenable to endless scale repetition either, which is part of the reason I'm here on Hacker News and not hanging out at Musician's News. But I did at least come to an appreciation for what I'm missing out on. Like I said in my original message, I have no desire in propagating the "If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right". I don't really believe that anymore, despite having been raised that way. If you have to choose between that and half-assing everything, do it right every time, but if you understand the reasons for that "rule" then there are plenty of times it's worth just doing enough.
ehsanul 16y ago
I'm answering to you as I just finished my daily guitar practice, with stupid scales practice (triplet/reverse triplet/minor 7th flat five/pattern 1-5) and I still hate it. Advice: Don't do "stupid scales practice". Instead, try playing around with a few scales, aimless soloing basically. You'll build up as much muscle memory, probably muscle memory that will serve you better as the motions will be closer to what you will actually be doing when playing for real. Furthermore, it'll be fun, as you get to compose and come up with new tunes. I never did "practice", because I play guitar for fun. I'm good enough at it just playing whatever I like whenever I like. There's no need to force yourself into boring practice if you're not trying to become a professional guitarist.

jerf 16y ago

My personality isn't really amenable to endless scale repetition either, which is part of the reason I'm here on Hacker News and not hanging out at Musician's News. But I did at least come to an appreciation for what I'm missing out on. Like I said in my original message, I have no desire in propagating the "If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right". I don't really believe that anymore, despite having been raised that way. If you have to choose between that and half-assing everything, do it right every time, but if you understand the reasons for that "rule" then there are plenty of times it's worth just doing enough.

ehsanul 16y ago

I'm answering to you as I just finished my daily guitar practice, with stupid scales practice (triplet/reverse triplet/minor 7th flat five/pattern 1-5) and I still hate it. Advice: Don't do "stupid scales practice". Instead, try playing around with a few scales, aimless soloing basically. You'll build up as much muscle memory, probably muscle memory that will serve you better as the motions will be closer to what you will actually be doing when playing for real. Furthermore, it'll be fun, as you get to compose and come up with new tunes. I never did "practice", because I play guitar for fun. I'm good enough at it just playing whatever I like whenever I like. There's no need to force yourself into boring practice if you're not trying to become a professional guitarist.