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Comment by seanhunter | Hacker News Reader

You’d be amazed. I remember an undergrad guitarist complaining to me about having to be able to play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical.

A frikkin’ guitarist.

For those of you who don’t know, playing a scale in a different key on a guitar literally involves moving your first finger to a different fret and starting from there. There are two or three patterns you need to learn to be able to handle starting on a different string or different finger. But it’s not hard. I told him he should be ashamed of himself and to stop whining.

Playing in all keys on a sax or trumpet or whatever is a totally different kettle of fish. Still necessary to learn. Still ridiculous to be doing a music degree and not be able to just do but definitely much harder.

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You can study computer science without writing a single line of code. It's no different for music. Learning all the keys by heart is like learning your text editor keybindings, useful, but ultimately has little relevance to actual music theory and composition.

You’ll definitely be hampered in composition if you don’t have decent keyboard fluency and I would say this is table stakes for that. But yes this is more directly relevant to performance. The guitarist in the anecdote above wanted a soloist career so was definitely squarely in the group for which playing scales is a minimum requirement.

I doubt he plays scales on concerts. It is actually requirement that is not directly related to ability to play music.

https://youtu.be/I_AX4R-d29o are you sure?

Music degrees are usually designed to train musicians that can perform, compose, transpose and teach.

Playing every scale is a fundamental step in learning to transpose, that is to play music in more than the key you learned it in. It's a necessary step for when a guitar player has learned some piece in say, C major and then they need to perform that piece with a singer that can't physically sing in that key.

Luckily for the vast majority of guitarists who don’t know much of any theory there are these magical devices called a capo!

And digital keyboards have a transpose by semi-tone feature!

It is entirely possible to learn to teach, play, and create new music in many styles without any knowledge of music theory.

It’s really hard to get very good at live ensemble music performance without learning some theory as a byproduct of the necessity of communicating with other musicians.

It’s really hard to get good at playing singing and playing songs on instruments like the piano or guitar without learning the names of some chords because reading at least chord and lyric sheets will accelerate your learning process.

I definitely know guitarists who know basically zero theory but who could hear a song a couple of times and then accompany a singer in any key based on playing by ear and interpreted and performed in a way that the original songwriter couldn’t have been imagined.

The entirety of the Nashville music industry is based around a notation system called the Nashville notation. 1s, 5s, diamonds, bars. The keys are left out and depend on which singer is recording with the band. Five note scales, bends, and capos and you’re talking about half of the popular recorded music in the USA in the 20th century, from rock to blues and country and everything in between.

Playing with a capo sounds different to playing without one, and digital keyboards don't sound the same as acoustic instruments.

Sure you might make a career as a musician playing everything by ear, and there is nothing wrong with that. But a university trained viola player can join an orchestra, be handed violin sheet music and then perform having never heard or practiced the music before.

You don't really need to go do a degree in music at all if your only goal is performance and you have intuitive aptitude, but if your plan is to teach, you're going to be a pretty awful teacher if you only can teach students to ape your specific methodology rather than being able to introduce them to the lingua franca that most musicians are using.

I could be handed piano sheet music and play it straight away in elementary school. It is not that hard to read sheet music and it does not require scales which I never bothered to learn. I was not some kind of prodigy either. It is just that if you play enough, music sheet becomes like normal reading - you just know what is written there. The rest is manual dexterity.

Ability to play from the sheet without preparation if completely orthogonal to anything in this thread. Especially to ability to play all the scales in all variations to the perfection for the practice test.

Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose, and musicians need to be able to play something they have rehearsed accurately, and musicians need to be able to play all across a large range.

Testing scales tests all of these things, and more simultaneously. I fail to see the problem. If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?

Like, none of what you wrote here has nothing whatsoever with the actual concrete practice test this particular guitarist complained about. Testing scales does not test any of these, actually. It is just absurd to claim that playing scales at practice test is done in order to test how you play "something you have rehearsed accurately" or "ability to transpose".

> If you're as good at sight-reading as you say, you can just read the scales off the sheet music and play them all perfectly the first time, so what's the problem?

So basically, you do not know anything about the test the guitarist complained about.

> Musicians need to know the sharps and flats in different keys in order to transpose

> Testing scales tests all of these things

I don't see how testing scales tests knowing the sharps and flats really. If you're playing all the (major) scales on a string instrument, it's all about starting on the right note, and then doing the scale pattern: whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. On a guitar, half is one fret and whole is two, and you need to know how to jump to the next string if you don't want to just walk the length of the fretboard. I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others, and keyboards are setup for c-major, so it takes some practice to get the sense of where the whole and half tones are for other keys, but the example of guitar is not hard. If you can play guitar and have a week to practice it, you should be able to play any major/minor scale on demand.

If you can play the scale, you can probably take the time and think the sharps and flats, but that doesn't really mean you know them, IMHO.

> I've never played a wind instrument, but I understand those tend to be tuned to play in certain keys and it can be akward to play in others

It’s been a while since I played (stopped after college), but yes. Wind instruments really only play in one key. It is really rare to have sheet music in a different key and because of that transposing is not a skill that you really need to be successful. You still learn scales… I played one of the few instruments where you were expected to be able to transpose (F horn with some older music in Eb). Even then, while it wasn’t hard, it wasn’t a common skill.

Guitar, string, and piano are an entirely different beast. And that flexibility of scales and keys is probably why you don’t see many wind instruments professionally playing outside of orchestras.

You see wind instruments outside of orchestras all the time though. The main reason for the domination of guitar and piano is economic: you can play more notes at once and therefore have played richer sound with fewer players. You can split the gig money across less people. It really has nothing to do with the number of wind players that can transpose.

IMO knowing about sharps and flats is an impediment to transposition. I play alto recorder, and I was very careful to avoid learning any sheet music. Instead I wrote a simple Python script to convert MIDI files to numbers, with 0 representing the lowest note, 1 representing a semitone above it, and so on. I then memorized the fingering for each number. I can transpose in my head just by adding or subtracting. And I practice scales based on the semitone intervals between the degrees of the scale, so I only need to know major/minor/wholetone/pentatonic etc. and just change the starting note.

This is more difficult on the standard piano because of the badly designed keyboard, but you can get isomorphic keyboards that let you play all the keys without learning all the sharps and flats.

The quitarist in question was looking for soloist career, so singer wont be an issue. Plus, it is not exactly as if he ever needed to do that quickly on the fly. He does not need to know when all in all variations for that either. Being able to understand and look up scales in that unique situation is useful, but that does not require being able to "play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical." I am not saying that school does not have right to put in such task, but I am saying that it 100% makes sense that student does not like it.

And second, it is not like you would pass practical just by knowing which notes and chords are in it. You need to play in tempo, with accents and all that jazz. It does require training even if you know exactly what you are supposed to do. Except that this training is brain dead boring.

I disagree. One can read without knowing how to recite the abc’s (ie alphabetic order), sure. But anybody that is a competent reader will have little problem learning the abc’s if they were forced to recite it for a test.

You claim to be a competent musician who doesn’t know scales. I can imagine half-diminished and other intermediate level stuff being non-essential but at the very least major and minor scale knowledge is needed to read music. Being able to sight read implies playing in all keys, which requires knowing the major/minor scales.

Well this is wildly wrong. Scales, arpeggios, etc. are taught not just for the theoretical understanding they help with but because they occur VERY frequently in actual pieces

If you're in music school, and are not already performing at a fairly high level, and not interested in being challenged beyond the bare minimum skill set needed for a given position, you're wasting your time and money. You'll never catch up with the competition.

The arts are probably one area in general where it's mostly impractical to show up at college, decide this thing is really cool, and decide to make a career out of it--over and above the lottery nature of the field generally.

Arguably there are some aspects of this in software as well--deliberately avoiding the CS term--but it's almost certainly going to be really hard for someone with no music background to show up at university and decide this is something they're really interested in.

At a first or second tier school, it would be basically unthinkable. None of the professors would even be willing to give you lessons -- they fill their studios through the audition process. It would be a huge waste of money to pay college tuition for remedial music lessons. Also, a big part of college music study is playing in ensembles that are coached by faculty. You have to be at a level where you can hold your own in an ensemble or you can't even participate. The schools are careful to admit only those students who can hang in the ensembles. Getting into music school is an application process on top of getting into the college.

With that said, you could get lessons from a graduate student who wants to earn some money.

My observation (two kids in music school) is that undergrad music is almost like grad school in other fields, in that you sign up with a specific professor who is your teacher for 4 years, and their job is to turn you into a fully fledged professional. The kids who are coming out of those programs are ready to start an independent professional career, the only obstacle being competition and not competence. My daughter, who is graduating this spring, is in fact playing professionally.

(At a tech school) I signed up early-on for an Intro to Music course I thought would be interesting--and to be clear it was. But as it turned out the person teaching the class was a pretty well-known choral director (John Oliver as I recall) and pretty much everyone else in the class were well-versed in music and were there because of said well-known choral director so not knowing the difference between major and minor keys wasn't really part of the program.

It was fine. It just wasn't really what I signed up for.

Whether you're playing by ear or by sight, having the current scale baked into muscle memory makes it a lot easier to hit the right next note on the first attempt. Otherwise you'll be frequently off by a semitone, or end up using non-optimal finger positions (which can be hard to unlearn).

Any given melody will modulate between multiple major and minor scales; see Coltrane's "Giant Steps" for an extreme example.

Some of the most revered guitar players, like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani or John Petrucci regularly play scales during their concerts. Of course, they don't keep to one scale while playing -- they're masters of their craft, so they play a different scale every other measure.

See e.g. https://youtu.be/Z01s5siJl6E -- the first two licks are clear examples of walking the scale, in one or both directions respectively -- or https://youtu.be/lGnEy9COP88

They have these things called midi guitars now. You don't need keyboard fluency. Hell, now a days you don't need any instrument other than a novation launchpad (a button grid). However, if you are going for a music degree, you should be able to know what the difference between a dorian and mixolydian scale. You should know that there's 7 different ways to play a D major on the guitar. You should know how to do pentatonic scales in any key as well as blues harmonic scales. Any guitarist who wants to play professionally needs to know this. Whether they are a rhythm guitarist, a soloist, a satanist, or a folk strummer. It's not just about being "gud", but knowing how to construct a solo, using those scales, in the songs key. That is very VERY much required. If you are interested in pursuing music as a degree then these things are table stakes. It's taught in high school. Go brush up.

Not an expert, but feel like there's a ton of professional guitarists who don't know these things?

what is a professional? Steve Vai? He knows all his scales. Eddie Van Halen? He's mastered scales at 12. Jimmy Page? ditto. Buddy Guy? He invented one.

If you're talking about a touring musician, or a studio musician, they absolutely know their scales.

Anyone who makes more than $20k/year with their guitar knows their scales.

Other cherrypicked examples, Dave Grohl and Clapton famously had no formal training and just learned by listening to and emulating artists they liked. I suspect they make over 20k/year.

Dave Grohl knows his scales now. Yes, if you make a band and become successful you can call yourself a professional without music theory. If you go back to what I said though, I said as a degree.

Counterpoint[0]: I have a master's degree in composition and I don't play any instruments at a decent level of performance. I would say the requisite skill is knowing how instruments sound, how they sound together, where their limits are, where the golden sounds and techniques can be found, and how to notate all of that so you can reproduce it accurately. If you can read a piece of music and know what it sounds like without needing to hear it played, you'll be fine. And that's also a skill you can learn, just like performance. The rest of composition is experience, artistic vision, and luck, just like every other job.

[0] wink

Music performance is different from music theory, like software engineering is different from computer science.

> You can study computer science without writing a single line of code

You can, but you won’t . If your name isn’t Edsger Dijkstra that’s a ridiculous proposition. I could study chemistry without touching a test tube, but that’s also a ridiculous proposition.

The problem with scales on a guitar is not getting to the next note, which is relatively easy. It's if you're playing a piece and you haven't worked out the scale to use first and then halfway through you find you need to either get your index finger off the string it's on and onto the string above, or get your pinky waaaaay over there on the same string, and what looks like a simple step is actually really hard - in that scale.

Unless you're using open strings for some effect then most transpositions should be isomorphic on a guitar. And if the open resonances matter a capo has you sorted.

I hope "all scales" didn't include modes other than Ionian and Aeolian. And then there's harmonic minors.

> A frikkin’ guitarist.

> There are two or three patterns you need to learn to be able to handle starting on a different string or different finger.

This is simply wrong.

Just the 3-note-per-string supershape covering the western modes is a cycle of seven ordered shapes for each string. As soon as you start including 2- or 4-note-per-string sub-patterns to move to the required position on the neck, the number of the overall fingerings and movements to memorize and practice explodes. This of course doesn't take the pesky B-string into account.

If you're a piano player, imagine playing on 6 rows of uncoloured keys of similar size, each row except one is shifted by a fourth, and the key width diminishes going up the scale (to an uncomfortable degree). No chords on a single row allowed. Oh, and you need two fingers on opposite hands to make a single sound.

Lol. Even though it’s not my first study I can play the guitar and certainly know what’s involved in playing all the major and minor modes. Your explanation grossly exaggerates the complexity.

> Your explanation grossly exaggerates the complexity.

Where exactly? Could you please show it?

The cycle of seven shapes. Sounds super fancy but those are all tiny. I literally learned that pattern for the major modes in all positions on the neck in a day and was fluent less than a week later. When you put those small pieces together you make one of the two or three patterns that I mentioned. for example take the three note groups tone tone (cross) tone tone (cross) semitone tone tone (cross) tone semitone if you want to play a two octave major scale starting on the first finger on either of the two lower strings. That pattern is just swapped around if you want to start on the second finger. So you just play tone (cross) semitone tone (cross) to play the first octave to the seventh degree and then either slide up a fret and do the first pattern I mentioned or continue across.

And if you play those patterns then all the modes of the major scale just kind of fall out of that.

Not boasting - it’s just not a complicated thing at all.

> I remember an undergrad guitarist complaining to me about having to be able to play all scales in all keys with all possible variations of articulation for his practical.

> A frikkin’ guitarist.

What instruments do you play? I'm going to guess not guitar. Guitar is one of the few instruments that very many people learn by themselves, by ear, and can get extremely good without foundations like scales and reading notation. I am not surprised about a guitarist struggling to "formalize" their guitar-playing as an undergrad, where it can be as hard as learning a new language when you're an adult.

I do play guitar and can most certainly play any kind of scale. I was a professional bass player (electric and double bass) and studied to postgrad level. I also play “composer’s piano”. The guitarist in question was an undergrad classical guitarist studying at one of the top London conservatoires. He wasn’t someone who learned by ear.

Transposing a scale to a different key would be straightforward on a guitar (e.g. with a capo), it's just that playing any scale might be difficult independent of the key.

???

Or without a capo. It's more common to practice scales without one since songs are in guitar-friendly keys like G and C often enough that you want to be able to solo in them without a capo.

I would agree that transposing on a guitar is definitely easier than most other instruments. But it is hardly trivial or easy, assuming you actually have to span the entire fretboard.

Scales on a piano, on the other hand...

I haven't practiced them in twenty years and I can still play them decently. If they start on a black key I need 3 seconds to play an octave in my mind, to double check the first finger of each hand. Twenty years ago I didn't even need that.

A little harder than playing scales on a fish.

You can tune a piano, but you can tuna fish.

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