One of the most important things to practice on your instrument, if you want to compose or improvise, is scales and modes. This chapter provides charts for the most common modes and scales. One of the things people usually do is that they only practice the scales up and down. The problem with this is that when you improvise it sounds like you’re playing a scale, instead of a melody. A good way to break out of this is to mix up the way you’re playing the scales. Here are some ways you should practice the scales and modes:
This is the ‘standard’ way of practicing your scales. Run the scale vertically up and down the fretboard.
This is one of the best ways to break out of standard scale playing. The idea is to play a note, then skip an interval and then go back to the note you skipped over. You can do this exercise with any interval. Here is an outline of the variations you can play:
TODO – Check table for correctness….
|
3rds |
root |
3 |
2 |
4 |
3 |
5 |
4 |
6 |
5 |
7 |
6 |
root |
|
4ths |
root |
4 |
2 |
5 |
3 |
6 |
4 |
7 |
5 |
root |
6 |
9 |
|
5th |
root |
5 |
2 |
6 |
3 |
7 |
4 |
root |
5 |
9 |
6 |
11 |
|
6th |
root |
6 |
2 |
7 |
3 |
root |
11 |
9 |
5 |
11 |
6 |
13 |
|
7th |
root |
7 |
2 |
root |
3 |
9 |
11 |
3 |
5 |
13 |
6 |
5 |
This way of playing moves you out of the fixed positions and make you have to move your arm/wrist up and down the neck. You pick one, two and then three adjacent strings to play the scales. Do this for all the strings.