Melodies vs Scales

Tommy Gibbons · Posted 21 Feb 2009 1:48 am

The problem is , I don't really understand. I "hear" the melody, not the scale. I would like to play scales during fills, etc. I can't "hear" this!!! I hear musicians playing these licks, but don't understand where they come from. I don't guess I understand theory. Your advice is greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance!!! Tommy

Brian Kurlychek · From: Maine, USA

The melody comes from notes in the scale.

This is a tough thing to grasp (for me anyway) and is why I feel most people don't learn it.

I think you have to just keep on keepin' on and it will come over time in little spurts of "hey, I get it now".

There are alot of free scales lessons from people here on the forum. These should help.

Here is a link to one of the free ones if you don't already have it:

http://bb.steelguitarforum.com/viewtopic.php?t=149999&highlight=scales
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Marc Friedland · From: Fort Collins, CO

Hi Tommy,

Your problem of not understanding is very understandable.
You can “hear” the melody because someone has already sung it and/or played it on an instrument and you have heard it enough times to “take it in” and commit it to memory.

The theory behind most melodies, licks & riffs are based on scales, but usually only segments and variations of the scale, and seldom in the exact order of the scale without deviation.
See **disclaimers** below.

If you can already play the pedal steel guitar some-what, but don’t know how to create your own cool sounding, effective fills, then yes, learning “some” theory will probably help, providing you learn how to apply it to the music you’re playing.
Knowing what the notes of a scale are and where to find them on the neck of the steel guitar can be extremely useful, but not the only ingredients needed to figure out the melody to a song, or to know what portion of the scale to play for a fill or solo. I believe you need to remember the relative pitch of each note in a particular scale and how they all relate to each other, and if that’s not natural for you at this point, you’ll need to spend time with the process until it is. You may want to consider taking some private lessons, or some on-line instruction that focuses on hearing and understanding relative pitch.
It would also be helpful to know and understand which notes of the scales other players have chosen to harmonize together and when and why they chose to play those combinations. In that regard, the charts I’m offering may at least give you a good starting point.
When I first started I was terrible at figuring out melodies or creating my own fills, and now I’m much better at it.

Hopefully this will help a little, but obviously, learning music theory and how to apply it to your instrument requires much more than me attempting to communicate it to you by simply writing a couple of paragraphs about it.

I haven’t looked in to it, but I’m sure there’s plenty of learning materials available.
Have you seen Mike Perlowin’s teaching material on the subject?

If you don’t already have it, please send me an email to
Marc4Music@aol.com with your email address, and I will send you my free charts of easy to find and play Major, Minor, & 7th scales for the E9 neck, that Brian mentioned above.

Marc

Disclaimers:

Some riffs origins are simply based on something repetitive that sounds cool or hip (neat, boss, exciting, interesting – you can put in your own adjectives) and many times will lend itself to the tuning of the particular instrument you’re playing. But even in this case, if you dissect the riff, it can be related to a scale or variation of a scale.

The Christmas carol, Joy To The World uses every note of the major scale, and the very beginning of the song uses the major scale in it’s entirety, but in reverse order.
So if you can “hear” or sing the melody to that you can “hear” a major scale.

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

Tommy, most likely you already are playing parts of scales when you play the melodies. No one really plays the whole scale anyway, at least not without sounding boring and like you're playing a scale exercise! Melodies are usually made up of pieces of a scale: you might go part way up the scale then back down a bit then back up. There may be some jumps (so you're not playing every note in the scale) but with practice you'll hear that as the missing note from the scale and not get lost.

Let me give you a few examples to illustrate (hopefully you know these songs).

If you think of a C major scale (all the white notes on a piano starting with one C and ending at the next one), you can call the notes: C D E F G A B C

More generally you could call them by their position in the scale: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (=1 again)

or use the naming system from 'The Sound of Music':
Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Ti Do

Now let's take the opening line of "Tennessee Waltz" ("I was dancing, with my darling...") That melody comes right out of the 5 first notes of the major scale (but skips one note). So the notes (key of C)for "I was dan-cing" would be C D E (F) G [I put the F in parentheses because that's the note you skip and don't play, but I wrote it to show you that the G is really the next note in the scale after that skipped F. The second line of the song ("With my darling") is exactly the same: C D E (F) G.

So if you're playing the melody of Tennessee Waltz, you are playing out of the C major scale.

Here's another example, take "Mary Had a Little Lamb". Again let's use Key of C major.

The opening line is "Mary Had a Lit-tle Lamb" which in this case starts on the 3rd degree of the C major scale, the note E, and goes as follows: E D C D E E E.

In this case there are no skipped notes but all 3 notes played (E D and C) come right out of the C scale), starting in the middle, coming down, then going back up.

So the point of learning scales isn't so that you can actually play whole scales during songs or solos but so that your ear will hear the relationships among the melody notes, or the notes of a solo you have in your mind. Then, you will realize that those are notes from the scale so, since you know how to play that scale, you'll know which notes from the scale to select to play what you want to play.

So the issue isn't, as stated in your topic headline "Music VS. Scales". It is "Music FROM Scales".

This rambled on longer than I had planned but I hope it has helped a bit.

Good luck!
Jimbeaux
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Earnest Bovine · From: Los Angeles CA USA

Jim Cohen · From: Philadelphia, PA

um... yeah.
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Earnest Bovine · From: Los Angeles CA USA

But those scales weren't much of a melody until the composers put an interesting rhythm to it.

Edward Meisse · From: Santa Rosa, California, USA

Practicing scales and arpeggios is largely ear training. You learn to hear what the various notes sound like in their various relationships with each other. Then when you hear something in your head (or for that matter anywhere else), you can reproduce it effortlessly, note for note and or chord for chord. That is one goal and purpose. Another is to improve dexterity. A third is to learn where the various notes are on the fretboard. I think that's the basic idea in a nutshell.
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Bob Hoffnar · From: Austin, Tx

I try to sing something (out loud or in my head) and then play it when I am playing. If I practice scales it makes it very easy. Instead of hunting and pecking for the notes I can hear the notes and look down at the neck and see where they are. It is a more musical way to play than following my hands around playing the licks I know.
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Bob

Ken Pippus · From: Langford, BC, Canada

If it's not Christmas, the old Scottish Folk Tune, "There'll Never Be Another Ewe" will also serve to demonstrate a complete scale.

KP

Ian Kerr · From: Queensland, Australia

There is one song I know that in the first half of the song the melody ascends the C major scale sequentially from low C to high C AND then in the second part descends sequentially back to where it all began.The song is called "All of a sudden my heart sings".Certainly not many songs follow this somewhat limiting format.The melody is easy.The notes are C D E F G A B C and then back down again.But I don't see the song as a scale exercise. The song has an even eighth note rhythm throughout and you need to know where the chord harmonies are for the scale notes .I think if you decided to play all the C scale notes at the 8th fret it may be harder to harmonize all the chords in this song with the scale notes.It could be done but I prefer to move around a bit more.Is It boring? No, I don't think so,because of the build up, the rhythm and the chord structure.I believe this song to be a good example of Jim's comment about "Making music from scales", in this case the whole major scale.

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