What I Learned When I Fell in Love with Piano Scales
tumbledesign.com
tumbledesign.com
If you want to internalize melody and harmony, practicing scales is a (relatively) quick path. Improvisation does not happen by 'just playing', that is a joke. You can get there if you 'just play' for long enough, but Charlie Parker didn't reach his incredible level of skill by noodling around aimlessly. Woodshedding is vital to developing real chops. If you're interested in obtaining ability, you will wind up in some kind of formal practice eventually.
You can avoid intentional practice if you want - have fun noodling your way into a successful business or exceptional development skill.
I dinked around with a prototype iPhone app for this before the iPad was a twinkle in Jobs' eye. Someone's probably got out an iPad app for this by now.
However, there's a reason that scales like the melodic minor are written with sharps (or "sharped flats"/naturals) ascending and flats/naturals descending. Sharps emphasize rising pitch and flats emphasize falling pitch, and can thus be bent slightly higher and lower, respectively. You would lose that with fixed chromatic note names.
(And as an aside, recognizing when a note in a scale has been modified from its normal position, and in which direction it was modified, is yet another reason to practice your scales!)
I see that the Chromatone costs "only" 190k yen now (~=U$1700),
Perfecting the scale and learning it at faster clip, to me is a good warm-up routine and gets your fingers fast enough to be able to play really fast licks. But to play and improvise good music, you just have to play. You don't learn how to hack via Turing Machines; you learn about Turing Machines after you spend long enough time hacking around, that the theoretical stuff becomes obvious to you after awhile.
Same thing with music and language, you can pour over the grammar and the circle of fifths you whole life and never be able to play/speak fluently until you immerse yourself in the idioms & the rhythm and just play what you know sounds right and not play what you know sounds wrong, naturally.
Piano is different than guitar because (from my limited knowledge) guitar songs are mostly based on chords while on the piano the chords are often broken up into individual notes, eliminating the need to memorize/remember specific chords/scales.
My take is that you don't need scales to enjoy music. But you will also never be at the level of the greats.
I don't want to be a great pianist, I just want to be decent at expressing myself in musical form. For awhile, I thought this meant scales weren't really for me.
It turns out that, on the contrary, they are ideal for me because they quickly get me up to speed on what tends to sound good.
Ultimately, you're right, but scales may be worth a glance even if you're somewhere in the middle!
I'm still figuring out how precisely the circle of fifths is useful, someone feel free to chime in.
On the other hand, if you're just playing "for fun," and aren't hitting any major technical frustration points, then whatever. Keep having fun. Just remember that if you start to not have fun, there are "icky" things like scales which can help you keep advancing. Scales can begin to help at any point in one's musical life.
A lot of guitar music, especially on the net, is written just as chords, which may be what you're thinking of. But the chords are the same notes whether you're playing them on guitar or piano. You could play exactly the same thing on piano as the guitar players do, and aside from sounding a little stiff, would make good musical sense. It's also common in pop and jazz for piano players to read off chord sheets (lead sheets).
Likewise, guitar music can be written out note-by-note just as piano music generally is. Classical guitar music is written this way, as well as rock leads.
Here's the thing about it, though. If you're thinking of it as individual notes, you're doing it the hard way. Scales and chords are a form of compression between the page and your brain, just as gzip is a form of compression between the web server and your browser. Once you figure them out, you can look at a measure and know what keys you need to hit without having to look at each note individually. Playing any instrument becomes much more fun once you have that skill.
I know that they are a necessary-evil to learn if you want to learn how to solo, figure out chord structure, etc. But the whole thing sounds as fishy to me as someone saying you want to learn programming, learn Theory of Computation/Turing Machine etc.
As another guitarist, I find that knowing scales let's me more easily noodle around and make stuff that sounds good. At this point, it's really just muscle memory, and I don't have to actually think about the scale much, I just intuitively know that putting my finger in a particular position will bring in a particular sound. Even when using all sorts of altered tunings, I can adapt quickly enough by mapping out scales I want to use. But that wouldn't be possible now if I hadn't learned about scales early on, and had some understanding of how they worked, however minor.
The programming analog might be learning how to write your own functions rather than than simply copy-pasting (ie, composing music yourself instead of just learning songs others have made).
I believe that doing always beats theory. If, however, one is open to injecting a small amount of theory into their doing, it can be quite powerful.
My goal with the article, and in general, is to reduce the barrier of entry on topics like 'music theory' that seem hard but really aren't.
I've gotten a few friends on the piano and said "Here, just mess around on these notes and see how it sounds." When it didn't sound like garbage, it felt like magic to them, but it was just scales. This simple example made them significantly more interested in piano and the fundamentals of music. Why do we obfuscate these topics and hold them back from otherwise capable people?
If we can find a way to integrate a small and specifically relevant amount of theory into our 'just doing', I think it only adds to the experience.
Unfortunately, the only way to put something into muscle memory is with repetition... endless, endless repetition. Alas. (No sarcasm.)
It is absolutely true that you can play without this, but instead of a powerful set of abstractions stuck in your muscle memory, you will have a patchy set of whatever you happened to need. Which, on average, due to the uneven need for them, will indeed correspond to most of what you need. But you will have holes compared to someone who is doing the full set, and the further you try to go the more those holes will bite you.
I say this without judgment. Far be it from me to condemn somebody for learning an instrument and choosing not to devote the time to become an utterly awesome expert. I think it's a perfectly viable choice to choose to become pretty decent. But you should know what you are doing.
It is not at all like needing to know Turing Machines to know how to program. It is much more like (though not identical to) needing to know how to type fluently to program; if you're hunting around for the open parenthesis, you're not programming. This metaphor breaks down because your editor will wait for you to find the key, at worst it breaks your flow; when playing music if you come up against a missing muscle routine you just failed something.
(Incidentally, when I put it this way it seems obvious, but for all the music training I've had and for all the various instruments I've learned or at least poked at, nobody has ever put it this way to me. It's too easy to insist that it's simply tradition, or to start babbling about some semi-mystical thing or other, when really it's quite simple: you can't play at a high level, or even a middling level, with your conscious mind. The vast bulk of your instrument-playing routines need to live in the cerebellum. It's that simple. It's not merely because it's tradition and there are concrete and simple reasons why technical exercises are necessary, appeals to authority are unnecessary.)
However I agree with you that practicing scales is excellent for building up your "typing" ability, whether it be on the guitar or on the piano to play fast licks. Same thing with the circle of fifth to identify which mode a particular song is in, and to be able identify which key/scale/chord you choose to solo on.
But this is more philosophical than technical - you learn rules so that you can break them.
Even scales are derived from other scales "hacked" into (diatonic => pentatonic scale, the "monkey-wrench" notes are what gives it a bluesy feel). Some songs have intentionally mismatched notes from a wrong scale that clash over a chord, to evoke an eerie feeling from the listener. Similarly, a performing musician never stops playing/strumming if he/she doesn't hit the right note or finger-down a whole entire chord, you keep going on. "There's never a wrong note, only a opportunity" - Miles Davis. Even if you are a straight-edge classical pianist, you have the artistic freedom to perform your piece with accents and timbre in the constraints of the tempo and melody of the sheet music.
Similarly when you program, some people like to take time to define their interfaces and draw out the class diagrams to figure out how all of the pieces fit together. I personally, like to open up NotePad++ and start typing the first thing that comes to mind, and run compile, probably get a bunch of compile errors, so I go back and correct them and run compile again and get errors again, and so forth until I get one piece working, and I build off that piece the second piece. Sure you need to learn typing, before you program. I'm just saying that for someone who's motivated to express themselves, whether that be through programming or music, that motivation makes them get through the technical barrier, not that the other way around.
tl;dr - Everyone has got a right to be wrong; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHVSptF3_G8&feature=avmsc...
Like I said in my original message, I have no desire in propagating the "If it's worth doing at all, it's worth doing right". I don't really believe that anymore, despite having been raised that way. If you have to choose between that and half-assing everything, do it right every time, but if you understand the reasons for that "rule" then there are plenty of times it's worth just doing enough.
Advice: Don't do "stupid scales practice". Instead, try playing around with a few scales, aimless soloing basically. You'll build up as much muscle memory, probably muscle memory that will serve you better as the motions will be closer to what you will actually be doing when playing for real.
Furthermore, it'll be fun, as you get to compose and come up with new tunes. I never did "practice", because I play guitar for fun. I'm good enough at it just playing whatever I like whenever I like. There's no need to force yourself into boring practice if you're not trying to become a professional guitarist.
Regarding your programming analogy, I think of it slightly differently -- scales : playing :: touch-typing : programming. Sure, you don't need it but it will make you a more efficient coder if you don't always have to look at the keys.
Another view is that learning scales is a way of compiling a whole lot of low-level muscle knowledge so you can think and play at a higher level of abstraction. You don't always think about programming in terms of Turing machines because languages hide that level of detail.
I agree with your last point though: you do need immersion and an "ear" to play well. However, practising technique and learning theory are not mutually exclusive. For example, learning a language is easier if you study some grammar as it gives you useful concepts for processing the spoken language you hear while immersed.