How To Practice And Use A Scale For Guitar Composition

*Hey everyone, here's something that I've been planning to write up and post for a long time. My short hand(ish, lol) guide on how to practice / use a scale. This is definitely foundational material for me so I'd highly recommend reading this / downloading this if you get a chance! 

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Your knowledge of scales and the ability to apply them is probably one of the most important things you can continuously work on as a guitar player. Follow these tips below in the context of any scale.

When you are working with a new scale, you want to do the following:

1) Aim To Visualize The Scale: You want to be able to see the scale fingerings / patterns on your guitar without playing. You should strive to be able to hold the patterns in your mind, such that you can play them without looking at the fretboard. This is critical as this will help you to create new ideas using notes from the scale. “If I see all the fingerings, I can try new patterns that I’ve never accessed before”

2) Never Practice By Just Running The Scale Up And Down: While it’s okay to do this, you need to avoid making this the ONLY way that you practice your scale. If you do this, you’re essentially just learning a riff.

3) Practice By Applying: Focus And Write / Improvise Using The Scale: This is the best way to practice composition: to literally start composing, regardless of the quality of your ideas, you need to engage in the idea of “play” using the materials. The first point on visualizing the scale will help a lot here. If you can hold the scale in your mind, that will help you to see potential options and fingerings that you can try.

*bonus tip: if you are feeling stuck when writing, perhaps try starting with from a guitar technique. You can try writing an idea using tapping for example. Anything is fair game, as long as you see the scale as the foundation that you are drawing notes from. Also, starting with a rhythm can be useful too!

4) Get A Looper Pedal! One of my biggest practice tools for the past decade has been a looper pedal. It’s great as it allows you to layer ideas, loop riffs, progressions, etc. You can use a looper to help you practice writing guitar parts, or even just improvise ideas over top. When you improv, you engage in play. Just make sure to focus on improvising based on a style that you actually enjoy.

5) Learn To Become Familiar With The Sound Of The Tonic. To really understand the sound of a scale, you need to understand the sound of the root as that will help you to learn how other sounds relate to that root. In every scale, there’s always a melodic hierarchy - all sounds want to travel towards a root. You can’t help facilitate this if you don’t know what the root sounds like.

6) Write Lines That Move Between Scale Patterns: If you are working with scale pattern shapes, you must write lines that deliberately go between scale patterns. This will help you to write lines that use the entire guitar neck. This is a skill that can only be trained through repeatedly writing lines that do this.

7) Know How To Play Something? See How It Fits Into The Scale: Pretty much everything can be contextualized within some kind of scale. In Math Rock, most of the music is diatonic and therefore, can be placed within a major scale. See if you can figure out the key and analyze how an idea relates to your major scale patterns.

8) Build Chords Using Notes From Your Scale Pattern: One of my favourites! Visualize the scale pattern and grab a cluster of notes together to create a chord. You’ll find that you can discover a lot of cool sounds when you try this. Chords can be the basis for guitar riffs, lead lines, and accompaniment. In my opinion, having knowledge based in chords is un paralleled!

9) Feeling Stuck With Lines That Sound Too Scale Like? Try String Skips. This builds on the last point. Working with chords in a scale is great as it promotes you to play lines that use string skips. That being said, just writing more angular melodies with string skips is a good way to start doing something different.

10) Using A Scale Is A System That You Need To Commit To. If you are learning a scale, you want to draw everything that you do from a scale from now on. I really believe in this. No more playing ideas without having a sense of context behind those notes.