A BETTER WAY TO PRACTICE SCALES | Playing Chord Scales From Every Chord Tone | TOM QUAYLE

hi there guys tom coyle here welcome back to the solo youtube channel i hope everybody is doing very well indeed as ever if you're new here or you've just got the solo app or you're thinking about getting it make sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons below and of course the bell notification icon because david and i are uploading brand new lesson content for the app and generally for guitar players on this channel every single week so for today's lesson i want to talk about scales and more specifically how guitarists tend to practice them now this is probably relevant to other instruments as well but for today's focus we'll be thinking about the guitar but if you are playing a different instrument feel free to practice this material too it's really really useful now the way that most guitar players or most musicians practice scales is they will start from the root note and ascend or descend through one octave or multiple octaves so if i was going to play the c major scale i might do the following and of course i could do that in multiple positions the key point here is i'm always starting on the root note now another way or a better way to practice is to practice each of your scales starting from each of the chord tones within that scale so all scales contain four chord tones so if you think about a seventh chord it has a root a third a fifth and a seventh of some description possibly it might have a fourth if it's some kind of sus chord for instance but generally just for the sake of what we're practicing today we're going to be talking about the root the third the fifth and the seventh of some description within each of your scales now a really really good thing to do a very useful thing for your ears and your fingers and for your general musicianship is to practice your scales starting from each of those chord tones ascending and descending now on the guitar we can add another facet into this practice as well which is to practice each of these starting from every finger on the left hand as well because that will yield a different fingering depending on which finger we start on there's a lot to practice here but solo is set up beautifully to enable you to practice this material with ease with the great confirmation that you get from solo as you're playing through each of these intervallic functions and it will get you really thinking about which intervallic functions are in each of the scales as they're presented to you on screen so if we go over to the app here you can see that i'm in the changes trainer which might be a little bit counter-intuitive seeing as we're dealing with scales but i'll talk about that in a minute let's go to the level selection screen and at the top here you can see we've got all of our chord tones if we continue scrolling down we've got melodic structures voiceless structures and then we get to our chord scales now this is what we want to utilize today you can see we've got the chord scale third to third fifth to fifth seventh to seventh and then random starting chord tones and this is the powerful bit this is going to enable us to practice each of the scales over a given chord progression starting from the root the third the fifth the seventh or random starting points and that's a really powerful level so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start by selecting just the standard chord scale level you can see i've got all the things you are selected my order is forward so i'm ascending and i've left everything else just standard i've not repeated i've not changed the key and i'm going to hit start changes workout now you can see that solos presented me with the 1 2 flat 3 4 5 flat 6 flat 7 and 1 for this particular chord f minor 7. this is the first chord for this tune and it's called six in the key so it's giving me the relevant intervals or intervallic functions i'm going to play through those now starting on the first finger on the 8th fret of the a string now let's move to b flat minor seven this is called two in the key so it's giving me a dorian scale so now for me flat so this is knee flat mixolydian scale so on and so forth so i can work my way through starting from the root note of each of these scales so on and so forth now again most guitar players at this point would stop and they would move on to another tune or they would change the fingerings for instance but the beauty of solo is it allows you to come in here and take chord scale third to third and now do exactly the same exercise but practice the scale from the third of that particular scale ascending up an octave now don't think of this as a different scale this is the same scale but you're playing it or hearing it from the third of the chord ascending to the third of the chord and the reason this works is because we are playing over a chord progression here and we're outlining the sound of that chord progression by playing the relevant chord scale for each of these chords and that chord scale outlines the sound of the chord if you start on one of the chord tones within that scale okay so for f minor seven for example it has a one a flat three a five and a flat seven so if i start the scale that solo asks for from the one of those chord tones the root the flat three the five or the flat seven or whatever the chord tones are that are relevant for a particular chord that solo is going to show you i will outline the sound of that chord so again here if i start the changes work out now you can see that solo has listed the same intervallic functions as the same scale as we were playing before but now it's starting from the flat third of this particular chord so the chord is an f minor seven so we've got basically uh a root a flat three a five and a flat seven you can see those intervallic functions listed within this scale you can see the flat three the five the flat seven and the one and solo is now asking me to play or visualize and play and hear of course those intervallic functions from the flat three so in this instance there's my f at the eighth fret of the a string i'm going to find the flat three and then i'm going to find all of these relevant intervallic functions for this scale from that f but i'm going to hear the harmony starting from the flat 3. so just for reference here is the f root note okay and i'm going gonna play the flat three four five flat six flat seven one two and flat three okay now it's giving me a b flat minor seven and i've got to do the same thing again because this chord also contains a root a flat three five and a flat seven as does its relevant chord scale in this case most guitar players most musicians would call this a dorian scale it's the second diatonic chord scale of a flat major in this case don't worry if you're not sure what that means you don't need to but any of you theory guys out there should understand that now i'm going to play and visualize the scale ascending through one octave starting from the flat three in this case so here's my b flat at the sixth fret of the e string let me find the flat three in this case so i'm going to go flat three four five six flat seven one root note two flat three okay now i have to do the same thing from e flat seven so in this case this is a mixolydian scale and it wants me to start from the third so here's my e flat at the sixth fret of the a string i'm going to play three four five six flat seven one two three so on and so forth so you can play all of the scales within solo over any of the chord progressions within solo from the third ascending an octave of course you could now come in change the chord scale level to fifth to fifth and go through the same thing so now fifth to fifth so five flat six flat seven one two flat three four five okay now the same thing from b flat minor seven sorry i actually accidentally triggered the fifth okay now from e flat now from a flat now if you listen here is the chord progression for all the things you are f minor seven b flat minor seven e flat seven to a flat major seven there's the first four chords now if you listen as i play through the chord scale starting from the fifth you can hear the harmony outlined and then [Music] so it's a really useful way to practice now again i could come in as the final chord tone i could select the seventh and play through from the seventh ascending um right the way through the progression so here's the seventh and then the same thing now what we're not trying to do here is we're not trying to line up chord tones on strong beats that is a different exercise that we will also do a video on that is to do with these passing note scales that are at the bottom all we're trying to do here is visualize the chord scale or a scale from each of the chord tones and at the moment what we've done is we've been just ascending through those chord scales from any random finger okay now before we make this more specific what we can do is come in and choose this random starting chord tone level now in this case what this is going to do is it's randomly going to pick a chord tone as a starting point so it might pick the root the third fifth or the seventh and you can see actually here we've got the flat three is a starting point for this f minor seven where it says what the next chord is you can see it's starting on the fifth so if i play through now we've got the flat three for f minor seven now it's asking me to play from the fifth of b flat which i'm going to find here and now the root note for e flat and the third for a flat fifth for d flat so i'm gonna actually play that here so i don't run out of guitar so this is a very very useful way of playing now feel free at the beginning of each new chord to just play the chord as a reference you may trigger one of the notes or two of the notes within the scale because obviously solo is listening to the notes you're playing but if you want that harmonic context you can actually do that so that would look a little bit like this so here's my f minor seven i played the chord just so i had it for reference and it's triggered the one but that's okay then play the scale now play the and then play from the flat three here [Music] don't worry if it triggers a couple of notes if you want that harmonic reference point it's worth it okay so when you've gone through each of those levels what you can now do is become very specific so you could say okay i'm gonna do the root note to root note or just the standard chord scale and i'm always going to start each of those scales from my first finger on the left hand and that's going to give me a specific set of fingerings so that might look something like this so f minus seven now b flat minor seven this is a dorian scale and then from e flat what i could now do is do the same thing but start from the second finger then the third finger and then the fourth finger on the left hand now the third and fourth will give me very similar results so you can but sometimes there will be slight differences okay now when you've done that then go to the third to third level chord scale third to third do the same thing play the chord scale starting from the first all the way through the set of changes then from the second finger all the way through the set of changes same thing from the third and fourth finger then do fifth to fifth same thing seventh to seventh same thing and then see if you can do the random level starting from the same finger each time okay what you'll do is you'll develop multiple pathways for each of these scales starting from any chord tone now the final step for all of this is to go into the basic level again just the chord scale and hit the reverse button and what this is going to do of course is descend through each of these scales so when i hit start changes work out now it's asking me to play the scale backwards or descending so if i find this f just here again i'm going to start on my first finger one flat seven flat six five four flat three two one same thing from b-flat and then from e-flat so on and so forth and again what we can do is come into the level select third to third and now we've got the scale descending not in this case because i need to hit reverse sorry guys then hit reverse and then do it and you can see now we've got the scale descending so now we've got flat three two one against that f minor seven now against the b flat so in this case we've got one sorry one flat three two one flat seven six five four and then the flat three so on and so forth so you can do it that way as well descending now it's a huge exercise to run through every single one of these different options it's going to take you months and months and months if not years to get everything down but there's a wealth of different tunes within solo that you can practice this stuff with so all of these different tunes when we add tunes on a fairly regular basis as well so you can practice with any of these different exercises or tunes doing this method so there we go guys that's quite a long lesson there's a lot of material to practice in there but if you're going to practice your scales the thing to take away from this video is to not just practice them from the root note ascending and descending it's a really good idea to practice them from all the other notes within the scale with particular preference for practicing ascending and descending from each of the chord tones within that scale so i would definitely recommend working in the changes trainer to start with then if you want to get into the scale trainer and start using specific scales that's a really good idea but the part of the reason why we do this is to outline harmony very specifically being able to target the chord tones within a scale okay so i hope that's useful guys i hope you're enjoying your practice time with solo and of course feel free to get in touch with us again if you want to go to the settings of the app go into that's the note calibration go into the settings there you can tap send feedback or help and that will allow you to send us an email you can ask us any questions leave comments below in the video of course and let us know if there's any particular videos you want us to cover any topics you want us to cover or of course anything you would like added to the app once again hit the like and subscribe buttons below and of course the bell notification icon to be notified every time we upload a new video hope you enjoyed that guys my name is tom quayle and i will see you in the next one bye-bye

Channel: Solo

Views: 12,487

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Id: Ptm4-Q380fQ

Length: 15min 56sec (956 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021