Originally Posted by: Slipin Lizard
Someone posted a while back "who cares if I can play Twinkle Twinkle Little Star?" and I said I did.
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I use that as a challenge to guitar students also. I challenge them to play it in E-flat, B-flat, play it on different strings, use a different pattern to play the same notes, play it all on one string, tell me what the scale degrees are, etc. Then I say, "Now, harmonize it with a bass line." :)

That's the sort of exercise that will get you to understand how music works, as opposed to simply how to manipulate the guitar.

Originally Posted by: Slipin Lizard
So, I just wrote down a bunch of spots on the fretboard that sounded "right" without worrying about what the notes actually were.
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An excellent experiment & creative exercise! Good for you. And notice another very important lesson: the sound comes first. Music theory doesn't tell you what notes to play or not to play; music theory doesn't tell you which notes you should like the sound of; or which note must come next in a song, melody or solo. There could be no music theory without first hearing tones, creating different tones, experimenting, observing how tones are different from each other, and by precisely how much, etc. It was invented after observing & experimenting with the sound of pure tones.

Music theory is not "a list of arbitrary, boring rules that boring, dead European guys force us to use or break."

Music Theory is the set of concepts that describes the nature of musical events.

It is the process of mentally identifying the sounds that occur in music. We do this in order to build a consistent set of ideas to describe what happens in music.

Music theory is how we mentally identify, organize & describe the sounds we make on musical instruments in playing music.
[QUOTE=Slipin Lizard]
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.

D Phrygian dominant, also known as the G harmonic minor scale.
[QUOTE=Slipin Lizard]
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.

Thanks for sharing. Well done. :)