Scale and mode shapes

[Bbach1]

I wonder if I've been thinking too one dimentionally when it comes to the guitar fretboard. We all know that key scales are generally taught on the guitar by the study of moveable shapes. It's pretty easy isn't it? Just memorize the shapes and you can move up and down the fretboard horizontally and vertically. You don't even have to know the notes you are playing or the scale degrees, you can just move the shape to play in a different key. Having been an old music minor piano playing wannabe back in college, I always felt like that was cheating. I always insisted with myself that I needed to learn the fretboard like a piano keyboard that extends vertically and horizontally as well.

A recent thread on modes got me to do some new work on modes and now I think I've been mistaken. Not totally, because I still feel players need to know what notes and scale degrees they are playing and need to harmonize with the chords they are soloing over rather than just mindlessly playing scale shapes in a certain key.

However, studying with a Diatonic Theory DVD, one of the exercises had me playing different mode shapes from the same position to compare them to the major scale shape. I started realizing that without having the scale and mode shapes memorized, it was a lot more difficult to make the key changes in the same position. You can certainly do it but you gotta think too much. Let's see, a Phrigian from G is actually the Phrigian mode of the Key of Eb major and those notes are G,Ab,Bb,C,D,Eb,F. By the time you get through that in your mind the song is over.

So much for my personal philosophy.

That's how stubborn I am. In my mind I kept rejecting the thought of learning shapes and now I've got to sit down and memorize them in order to make better use of modes.

Oh well, it gives me something different to practice.

[Tone Taster]

Well, the most important thing is what I call "Interval sense" practice your modes on 1 string and try to program or "sense" whether your moving a whole step or half step

 

Next, do this with playing the scale in 3rds, 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, 7ths

 

Also, with those fingerboard patterns you referred to; you need to mine out all of the major and minor arps and arp inversions w/in that one fingering and then use the scale only as a means to anend to those chord(arp) tones

[Gruupi]

I think on guitar you really need both. Since guitar isn't linear like a piano or saxaphone, I think we tend to learn boxes and shapes and work off of chord grips. There may be some people out there that can instantly translate from what they want to hear from all the theory they know to the fretboard but most of us need these patterns to guide us when we are actually playing.

 

I am in the process of trying to almost do the opposite of what you are doing Bbach, I play patterns, scales and by ear and haven't really thought much about the intervals and theory. Since I am trying to learn to play over changes better, I am attempting to think more about the chords underlying what I am playing and see those patterns and the numbers (intervals). Its not like I have to think about every note, but harmonicly its important to know the key elements. If someone wants to play over an A7#9 for instance, it sure is helpfull to know the notes of that chord, how it sounds first, then memorize the patterns.

 

Before I was just kind of sounding things out by hunt and peck, I could improvise over things this way but only after spending some time rejecting the notes that didn't work (if this makes any sense). I have a long way to go, but even in the short month I have been working on this, my improvising has gotten alot better. The key for me is to be thinking of or listening to the chord changes rather than just kind of blowing over them. This has mostly been in a blues context so the changes are relativly easy to follow, you can add extensions and alterations as needed but can I can still play some simple old patterns if I get lost.

[Bbach1]

Originally posted by Gruupi:

I think on guitar you really need both.

Seems to be so. I've always thought in terms of intervals, scale/chord degrees, and notes. I've got to mix in some shape learning to allow for a quicker transition on the fly.

[A String]

I use the shapes for practical playing and the theory behind them for being a smart ass.

[A String]

In all seriousness, I had a heck of a time with modes because, no one wanted me to just learn the shapes. One day, I sat down, figured out the shapes and learned the modes as if they were just scales. Then, once I had the different shapes down, I started to learn the theory behind the modes. I was able to learn it ten times faster that way.

 

I think it's because I'm a very "hands on" learner and I learn concrete ideas quicker then abstract ones...

[Gruupi]

A-string just confirmed my suspicians from what everybody calls me, I'm a dumbass, I only know the shapes. I'm making progress on the Dorian mode, and I love the sounds that are coming out. I guess I should think about some of the other modes soon, maybe Lydian next. Of coarse be ready for me to flood the board with questions again when I do lol.

[UnderTheGroove_dup2]

I think the shapes are really valuable. I agree that you need to know what the shapes represent, and be able to see the differences between them.

 

Another way at looking at the modes on the fretboard is to think about the interval shapes from the root note. If you know what intervals you need to play the mode, you can just find and play those to create that mode. You end up with the same fretboard shapes, but the approach is slightly different.

[Fumblyfingers]

I have said it before.....the patterns, shapes, boxes...whatever you call them, give you a jump start and the beauty of it is that we as guitarists can slide these up and down to transpose. no learning a whole new deal. So why not take advantage of it?

 

Then one can also intersperse theory, ear training, arpeggio's etc and get the whole picture....if they want to. Not everyone is going to want to end up a fully theoried out dot reading studio musician. Some players just want to get reasonably confident to be able to solo over basic changes.

 

Anyone who tells you not to learn patterns is not giving the best advice.

 

Once you have your Major Scale, Harmonic Minor and Melodic Minor scales down all over the neck you will have a pretty good idea of what is going on. Someone who has got that far is more than likely going to take it further or would have done so already.

[musicalhair]

I like the idea of "interval sense", I also like the ideas that Pat Martino talks about in his "nature of the guitar" stuff. I wrote a long thing about his ideas, but it is now at the end of this post.

 

I think we have to use what ever works when learning something initially but then strive to understand it from every possible angle to make it useful in every possible situation we might need it in. Visual patterns work to learn how to use the full set of notes in any given scale, mode, arp or whatever, but it doesn't give us a knowledge of what each note in that pattern sounds like over the chord or in the context we plan to use it in.

 

An important part of learning our visual geometric patters is the knowledge of our octave shapes. When we are learning a geometric pattern on the guitar, one way we ensure it is in deed a repeating pattern is checking any given note against the octave down or up into the part of the pattern we're more sure about. So we have a handful of "universal" patterns, octave shapes. To use any other interval shape in such a checking manner means we have to understand the scale degree and it's relationship to the next degree we're looking for. Doing this visually requires a lot of memorization. Hearing the function of each note in the pattern and understanding it gives us an intuitive-- more solidly intuitive as our hearing gets better-- sense of how to continue the pattern. The more esoteric the pattern we're working on the more finely tuned our sense of hearing has to be.

 

The ultimate geometric patterns we have are the chromatic scale patterns. We should be able to see our patterns within a greater context of the chromatic scale patterns. If we start our scale with the first finger on the low E, we should see the ensuing pattern in a greater context of the chromatic scale. If we start it on the with the second finger, again there is a chromatic scale to see it comeing out of. If we are stuffing a Bb major chord into a tune that is in A and should be playing an A chord but for what ever deceptive or other reason we stuck in a Bb, we could see that Bb major in a greater context of A major and of a chromatic scale from A to A.

 

"Visualizing" it or "Seeing" in our mind it should not just conjure up a visual image nor just a sense of the feeling of playing it in our fingers, but it should also generate a memory of the sound it would make. By analogy when we add Basil to a tomato sauce we don't just go by what a right amount of basil "looks" like, but what it would taste like after having tasted it many times.

 

 

Here is something about Pat Martino's ideas-- my probably very bad version of them--, as referenced above. Not needed for the discussion but they are helpful if they help you and confusing otherwise.

 

 

The piano has 5 black keys and 7 white keys arranged in a straight line. 5 + 7 = 12 diatonic notes. However Pat feels that this basis in linearity that comes from piano and pervades all traditional of harmony has no place on guitar. He instead looked not to the arrangement of white and black keys for for some other way to boil down how harmony lays itself out on the guitar.

 

He saw that these two repeating patterns on the piano remain the same up and down. So once you saw how something worked along one sequence of the 2 continuous series of white and black keys you could understand the piano up and down.

 

The two repeating series he found on the guitar are the diminished and augmented chords. He took the 4 notes of the diminished and the 3 notes of the augemented and saw that 4 x 3 = 12.

 

This takes an artistic leap of faith to even consider that the linearity of the keyboard layout as a function the two patterns laying across the same line (5 + 7) and seeing it as a math concept of linear notes (like linear feet), and seeing that the area of the guitar needs harmony spelled out for us not in linear notes but "square notes" like the way square feet describes your yard and not a distance. The whole idea that piano has 2 repeating systems and they add up to 12 as you would do on a number line (add things), and the fact that he found to repeating systems that when considered dimensionally (and not linearly) their 4 x 3 also equal 12.

 

This all means that we have to think 2 dimensionally. For this to become the basis of how we teach the understanding of guitar as opposed to a cute mind trick will take a lot. In a sense it is a lot like when we first encounter the possibility of 5th or greater dimensions in a science or math class or anywhere else. We're presented with the idea of an animal that lives in a line, there is only back and forth for them with time being a second dimension for them. anything crossing that line would exist in a dimension inaccessible to that animal but it would see a point effected by the multidimensional creature. We are a high order creature in that we live in a two dimensional world of the guitar and not the one dimensional world of piano. All of music theory is taught with one dimension of pitch versus the second dimension of time. We on guitar descend in a sense to read two dimensional music on our three dimensional instrument (fret x string x time).

 

Since we don't think or improvise on the staff we don't have to be limited to two dimensional thinking.