Someone posted a while back "who cares if I can play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?" and I said I did. Since this is a guitar forum about playing guitar, go ahead and take the Pepsi Challenge... pickup your guitar and see if you can do it cold... "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star..." just start with any note and work your way through it.
Now I'll bet most people were pretty quick to work their way through it, even if they didn't know what the notes were, or the major scale they were in, or any major scale patterns. Sure, you might have hit some bum notes, but I'll bet you slid your fretting finger immediately up, or down, into the right position to correct your mistake. But how can that be? You don't even know the notes you're playing or what scale you're in... "ah" you say, "that's nothing special, I just played it by ear".
Ok, sure. But maybe that ear can help you another way... it did for me, here's how:
I've played for decades knowing the basic blues pentatonic scale, and really most of my soloing was based on the idea of using a five note scale. A while back, I made a much more serious effort to learn lead guitar, and was introduced to the seven note major scale, to the point where I could do a decent job playing most Major scale keys all over the fretboard. I began to understand that a lot of those "cool guitar riffs" I'd heard were outside of that five note limitation, instead using seven note scales to create melodies or distinct tonal "moods". Because of this, when I would jam to a backing track or even just noodle around with some lead ideas, I started tending to base my ideas on using seven notes instead of just staying in my pentatonic rut.
I often jam along with my BOSS DR880 Drum Machine , that has 500 preset jam loops in many different keys. It has both bass and drum sounds, and a surprisingly good sounding guitar effects section. There are a bunch of good rock and blues presets, but there are some really wild ones too... techno, heavy rock, gospel, jazz etc, and for some of these its pretty challenging to come up with a lead solo idea. I stumbled across one such tricky preset a couple of nights ago, and thought "ugh, I'll never be able to come up with something to go along with that..." but then thought, "hey, that's it then... listen to it and TRY your utmost to make something work..."
The track was this really heavy rock sounding bass & drum track, and as I listened, it reminded just a bit of that deep, pounding bass & rhythm track in some of the early scenes of "Blackhawk Down". You know, the "military convoy drives through the desert" bahmp! bahmp!... da, bahmp! bahmp... you get the idea. So I thought that Arabic/sitar kind of thing and just started noodling. Low and behold I'm starting to come up with some ideas I really like, but its weird. I'm finding I'm either playing notes very close together, moving in half-steps, or suddenly moving three or four frets up or down. But its sounding cool, and I eventually get a repeatable riff that really works with the music. I have no idea what I'm playing, all I know is its in the key of D, and I'm definitely in the key of D with the riff.
So I go get a piece of fretboard paper, and just start playing through the riff, and moving around the fretboard. I jot down only the notes that sound "right". I figure its whacked, because I don't seem to be coming close to being in one of the five major scale patterns. For those of you that know what I mean, I was getting a feeling that if I was in fact laying out a scale, it wasn't going to be a diatonic mode. So, I just wrote down a bunch of spots on the fretboard that sounded "right" without worrying about what the notes actually were. This is what I came up with:
E ||---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
B ||---|---|---|-x-|---|---|-x-|-x-|---|-x-|-x-|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
G ||---|---|---|---|-x-|---|-x-|-x-|---|---|-x-|-x-|---|-x-|-x-|---|-x-|---|-x-|-x-|---|---|---|---|
D ||---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A ||---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
E ||---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
3 5 7 9 12 15 17 19 21
I then went to this handy website and entered in all the fretboard positions that according to my ear, fit with the music:
http://www.all-guitar-chords.com/reverse_scales.php
Turns out, I had found all seven notes by ear, D, Eb, Gb, G, A, Bb, C, which for the key of D it identified as D Phrygian Major. Now that I knew what scale I was using, I was able to write it out on paper and start coming up with some ideas for patterns to make it a little more fluid. What was interesting to me in this whole experience was how actually using the scale first creatively really motivated me to figure out the details, and that even though I had never heard of this scale before, I was still able to identify it by ear. When I jotted down the notes on the fretboard paper, every single one was in the scale. Just thought I'd share this long-winded story for those of you who find learning scales boring... sometimes coming at it from a completely different direction can be really rewarding.
