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PeterNY
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Joined: 06/13/09
Posts: 15
PeterNY
Full Access
Joined: 06/13/09
Posts: 15
03/17/2013 7:39 pm
My first instrument was the piano, and I remember that if you wanted to play a C scale, you just ripped along the white keys. There was no memorization and no thought process. You just had to remember to tuck your right thumb under your fingers whenever you reached an ascending F or C, and you were half way home. (The right fingers jumped OVER the thumb on the way down.) As the book levels advanced, I progressed through the key signatures and learned them one black key at a time.

I found the guitar to be an interesting beast. Most players came from the same school of rock/blues, and I reacted with horror at the pentatonic scale. Okay, you've eliminated the F and the B notes from the C major/A minor scale. That will work wonders for the first four bars, but what happens when the harmony goes from C to F or Am to Dm? Don't you think you're going to need that F? How about when you hit that all powerful dominant G or dominant harmonic minor E7? How are you going to fill out your lines without that B note?

Fortunately, I found a nurturing teacher, who after starting me off with the classical finger styles of Sors, Carcassi and Giuliani, then impressed upon me that the western scale was a human convention and that other than tweaking the minor scale for harmonic and melodic purposes, there existed only one scale with different starting points on the neck (keys) and different starting points within the scale (modes). Eventually, I stopped thinking about scales and concentrated on harmonizing the notes from fake books with the chords written above them. That made all the difference, as I can take any lines of standard notation and make them my own as I solo from start to finish off a lead sheet.

After a year and change of playing guitar, my teacher encouraged me to improvise by pulling the score away from me when I played. This was tough love, but I improvised more around the chordal harmonies and hardly ever around the scale. Things got ever rougher. Soon he demanded that I use all 12 chromatic notes in my improvisations. "No leading tones or passing tones! I want all those off-key notes coming at me on the down beats, and I want the line to sound musical not free form," he ordered.

Again, the scale provided little refuge for my playing, and I learned to cheat the key by using the off key harmonics from Matt Dennis' classic jazz book Super Chords for the Great Standards. This is not an endorsement of the book. Although it is a single staff fake book, it is keyboard centric, and so piles of flatted/sharped fifths and ninths come at you in all directions as if you had a free left hand to play them, while your right hand worked the melody. I had to simplify many of those "super chords" to two or three harmonizing notes underneath—or sometimes on top of—the melody line.

Okay, I'm not putting down scales, because having them tucked away in your fingers avoids those awkward clams that bite you in the ear every now and then. It is said that Andres Segovia practiced his scales for two hours a day. He was a pretty good guitarist. On the other hand, if I had to play scales two hours a day, I would burn out in a week. Moral of the story - scales are a means; great music is the end.