Originally Posted by: Pothole814I'm practicing the C Major scale now in Fundamentals 2 but, keep going back and working on B.

If I could make a couple of suggestions... First, make sure you're not hammering away too hard on any one thing. I was surprised to find out not too long ago that a number of instructors, including those at MIT, recommend working on one particular skill (like learning the C major scale or learning the B chord) for only a few minutes at a time. Then they recommend moving on to something else. It seems an impossibly short amount of time, but I've found it really works... ever notice sometimes you seem to start really well with something, then after 10 minutes you're actually doing worse, not better? It has happened to me, and I think its just that after a number of repetitions, your brain starts to get bored and you lose focus. I've found that just working on one specific thing for two to three minutes, with 100% concentration, I can improve relatively quickly.

The other thing is with the C Major scale, once you know how to play it, even in just one position, start putting it into service right away. What really cements a scale into your memory is putting it into a context of your own choosing... so if you can, get a backing track that's appropriate for the major scale, and solo over it... again, even if its just in one position, and super simple... use the scale, be creative, make up simple melodic lines over the music and have fun with it. If something sounds "off", check if its because you played a note outside the scale, or if its just an odd note choice from the scale for that particular part of the backing track. Doing this will train your ear to actually "hear ahead" the notes that you are going to play. So instead of just playing in a scale pattern and hoping that the notes you play sound good over the music, you'll actually start to anticipate what will sound good before you play it.

Essentially, you're familiarizing yourself with the intervalic relationships and not just the positions of the notes on the fretboard. If this sounds fancy and advanced, its not. If you play "Puff the Magic Dragon" by ear, how can you, without knowing the major scale? Well, its because you already know the melody so well, you can "hear" the intervals in your head before you play them, the same way that you can "hear" a perfect 5th just by thinking of the beginning of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". By soloing with your own ideas, even if you stay in one pattern, or one octave for that matter, you'll start to get a sense for how the notes of the scale relate to each other, the chords/bass lines you play them over, and what the resulting sound will be when you move from the note you're on, to the note you're about to play.