Create Scales whenever you want

[Sayonil Mitra]

First: Why??
There are millions of scales out there and each one has it’s own mood, tricks etc. So you will never run out of new licks to discover that is for sure. BUT… sometimes it may be daunting. The fact that there is sooooo much to learn may be not so exciting always. And trust me, when your creative juices are flowing like a mad river, learning a scale may not be the first thing you want to do.
Now: What???
There are many people who are just learning the scales, just starting out. But they are talented nonetheless and want to express or experiment right away. That’s fine. So here’s the thing.
Choose any 5-6 notes you want from all those notes in a scale possible. Let’s say, a b c c# d#. That’s it. It may sound weird, it may not. The scale may be there, may be has a name. But just go with it. Try to play next 2-3 minutes restricting yourself to the notes you have chosen. Do not like it? Choose another random 5-6 notes and play. With/without a backing track. You will start discovering new licks even before learning the scales and stuff. You can learn the scales later when you are in the mood.
The next step??
Whatever I said earlier is inspired by Indian Classical Music. It has scales in it made of every possible combination of notes out there. Now here’s the exciting part. There are scales in it which has a group notes while going up, but different group of notes while going down. (This concept maybe elsewhere too, I am not aware of.) Let’s say: the scale is C(lower) D E F G A B C(higher) A# A G F E D C(lower). Try to play it, try to create patterns, licks etc. It’s a whole new monster. And it’s not fixed. Change notes as you like.
I hope this is helpful for those who are absolute beginners and lazy like me in terms of learning scales but still want to be able to explore.
(….and I hope it’s easy to understand).

 

[idssdi]

This is a great tip for beginners. The thing about scales being different ascending to descending is a way the melodic minor scale is reached a lot of the time. And is a way how(according to Google) great classical composers(I don’t have examples of this at the moment unfortunately) used it. Basically they did what we know as the melodic minor scales ascending and natural minor descending.

 

[Sayonil Mitra]

Thanks Ids. I did not know that. Anyways, it’s a cool concept to use. Very challenging though.

 

[idssdi]

Yeah it can definitely be a challenging concept. Especially when you want to incorporate it when improvising. It requires a lot of thinking and you have to be very wary of which notes you change because not all of them will work but yeah it can sound great so imd efinetely gonna try to incorporate it into my playing!

 

[Christopher Lonski]

Yeah, the whole thing with melodic minor is that it incorporates the natural 7 which gives you a dominant V chord(notated as V7) which gives you a V7-i progression and a V7-i in minor or V7-I in major is the strongest resolution in music, also known as a “perfect cadence”. The harmonic minor scale only raises the 7 and it creates this harmony which is why it’s called harmonic minor, but it also creates a 1 1/2 steps between the b6 and natural 7, which melodically isnt ideal in classical music, especially for vocalists. Melodic minor fixes this melodic problem as you get the V7-i progression and there are only whole steps and half steps in the scale. As far as going up and down in with different scales, there is no real purpose for that in modern music.

 

[Christopher Lonski]

The other part that I meant to mention is that scale are cool and all, but it is much easier and more important to really spend time learning the sound and feel of all 12 intervals. Like Unison, minor 2nd, Major 3rd, perfect 5th, etc… All scales in western music are going to be made up of some combination of these intervals and it’s just a matter of which ones you play together, or which ones you dont play for that matter. Its good to try EVERY note against a major, minor, and dominant chord as those are the 3 base qualities of a chord. When you do this, use the same tonic for each chord as it will accentuate the differences between the chords, like F# Minor, F# Major, F# dominant. Have a friend play the chords for you, or create a recording of just one chord played over and over, and really listen to the sound of each note against the chord. Really do your best to feel what each note gives you. Really understand the quality of each note. You’ll quickly learn which notes feel more natural and the ones that feel “off”, but even the “off” ones can still be used musically. As a rule of thumb, the note of the chord are always a safe note to land on. Here’s a video of Guthrie Govan discussing the intervals and scales a bit.

Another great exercise is to play an open string (I always start with the low E) and then sing the notes against that droning E. Play the 1st fret, sing that note with the E in the background, then sing the 2nd fret against the E, then the 3rd and so on. When you sing each intervals with a droning note, you can really feel how the interval vibrates in you body and head. It gives you a better musical mind, and not just a necessarily a guitar skill.

 

[Christopher Lonski]

Another guy I HIGHLY recommend checking out that was actually one of my teachers is Carl Verheyen. He really stresses using the intervals and avoiding just playing scales up and down.
He even has a really awesome instructional video where he shows a bunch of his licks and whatnot here-

I CHALLENGE you guys to learn some of his licks!