The BEST Way to Learn Scales and Make Music [Composing with Bebop Dominant]

music and technology grows side-by-side expansions and technology lead to new instruments new sounds new ways to record music and for ambitious students new ways to learn and practice in this video I want to share with you one of the most incredible resources that I have ever found as a guitarist and how I personally implement it into my practice and more importantly I want to demonstrate now working with scales can convert directly over to creating music too often music students forget that scales are supposed to be musical and they end up just playing them up and down and with patterns and kind of lose sight of the forest through the trees so there's gonna be quite a bit of time in this video spent on translating and converting simple scale patterns into direct musical ideas now a few things before we get started number one this is completely free you don't have to pay a cent for this and number two is that this is not an ad it's gonna look like an ad but I just really really think this is a great piece of software it's totally free full disclosure the guy who made this is named Gary he runs the YouTube channel design course and he is a fan of my channel he's actually donated to my channel before and that's how this app showed up on my radar but me personally I'm just excited to show this off and what I made with it because I've been waiting so long for an app that looks this good and behaves this well there's a lot of imitations like this online you can find all sorts of things that kind of do what this app is doing but I don't feel like any of them do it as well and do it as pretty and do it as functionally as this one does so let's get started normally if you're looking to learn a new scale you might do something like just look it up in a book that you own but if that's not an option you might just Google a scale chart pattern and sorting through the images you'll often find that a single scale can be played in many different ways getting the scale shapes that you want in the size that you want with the notations that you want can be difficult or impossible through Google just alone and that's where frat astok shines like none other fantastic is an online dynamic scale generator featuring dozens of available scale types that can be customized to your own preference this can look like a lot at first but let's just take a look at how it might actually be used let's say you really enjoyed my video on the Phrygian dominant scale and wanted to start playing around with it more click scale and select Phrygian dominant now select a key I'll choose e immediately every single note of the e Phrygian dominant scale is displayed on the guitars fretboard and once again this can be kind of overwhelming and I don't find it very helpful to see all of this information at once so instead I'm going to change the fingering system from none to three notes per string this gives me a practical and playable scale shape for a Phrygian dominant now I personally don't need to see this much of the fretboard so I'll size it down a little bit by just adjusting these sliders now I can see a narrow area of the fretboard which is easier for me to look at but I can still see on either side of it if I want to expand my scale shapes for example this is e Phrygian dominant in its first position starting off of the first Note II but I could display its second shape starting on its second note by clicking the number two under position similarly I could see its seventh shape which starts on its seventh note by clicking on the number seven [Music] clicking back to none we can now see how these three shapes actually connect to one another now let's go back to that first shape again and take a look at how our chord tones and roots are actually displayed right now the root notes of the scale e are shown in white and the red notes indicate the notes of our tonic chord which would be an E major chord when improvising with a scale it's highly advised to be outlining the chord tones of the individual chords in the key and just outlining a major while playing the Phrygian dominant can sound great now if you find these colors distracting you can just turn them off by clicking these checkboxes so let's say I want to start practicing the scale well obviously you could just grab your metronome and go up and down practice different scale patterns but I personally enjoy just jamming out with the new scale it gives me a good idea of what it actually feels like and what it can behave like I think of it as like finger-painting you're just kind of getting your hands dirty and you might not make a great piece of art out of it but at least you got the idea of what the colors actually do and awesomely enough frantastic has built-in jam tracks with YouTube integration if I click backing tracks and then find my tonic II it gives me several different choices of tracks and fortunately one of them is in a Phrygian dominant and it's from my good colleague chess and with this track going I'm free to experiment up and down the scale and really get an idea of what it sounds like [Music] now do be careful a lot of jam tracks say something like it's in the key of D minor but they'll include chords that might come from D Dorian so I do recommend if you're jamming over a track to do some investigation into the chords of that track because sometimes the jam track composer might leave out some information about some chords that are actually outside of a key and that can really throw you off if you're new to this there's a few other features that I didn't mention like the ability to add an extra string if you're playing on a seven string and the ability to easily print out your customized charts and hang them wherever you like and honestly with all these features you should be able to save yourself quite a bit of money on books and apps and different resources because I mean let's face it if you buy a scale dictionary book you can't even customize that it's gonna give you preordained scale shapes it's not gonna let you you know see it the way you want to see it or the shapes that you want this is much more versatile and the fact that you can just print it out you can save it you could screenshot it you could do whatever you want with it totally free I think that's pretty awesome now for me personally I love learning new scales and playing with them to see how they feel what are the effects that they create but learning a new scale doesn't necessarily mean memorizing a new scale I have learned my bebop scales before but I cannot confidently say that I have them a memorized so for somebody like me this tool is very helpful to just kind of get my hands dirty and start playing around with scales that I'm familiar with I decided to start playing around with my B bebop dominant scale you can think of this as just being a major scale that also has a flat seventh in it or a mixolydian scale that has a natural seventh in it that means this scale has eight notes and we can also see that these four notes are just a half step apart creating some nice chromaticism when we ascend and descend through the scale now there's a lot to talk about regarding bebop scales so I've just posted a thirty minute lesson for my patreon subscribers regarding bebop scales and jazz basics if you're a subscriber check that out for this video I just want you to keep in mind that the bebop scale really sounds great over eight dominant seventh chord so if I'm playing a B bebop scale then I should think about playing a B seven underneath that so all I did was fire up able to nine and then I recorded myself playing a B seven with some finger picking and then the occasional East 7 for a footboard n F sharp 7 for the 5 after that I added some MIDI drums to help keep the beat then I plopped down a bassline that really just started off by me singing through what I was hearing in my head [Music] and now I had a pretty decent canvas upon which I could paint with my bebop scale I spent some time just noodling around with this sheet [Music] and then eventually I wrote this lick that I kept playing very sloppily so I just kept practicing it until I could get it somewhat cleaner [Music] now I really can't resist harmonized guitars so I wrote a harmony 1/3 up and recorded that [Music] but since I'm harmonizing chromatics here I did have to include a note outside of our bebop scale so this isn't easily as recognizable as a bebop shape [Music] but I really like the way that sounded it started reminding me of an um freeze McGee song or something by Phish so I pulled up a notepad and started typing out some lyrics coming up with melodies after that I set the song to beard stank and he recorded a drum part and sent it back to me which instantly gave the track more life [Applause] [Music] then I asked Mike bug Lee aka moogly for some piano parts and he sent him back to me in a reason 11 file now I use reason 10 so I took this as a welcome opportunity to have to upgrade to reason 11 unfortunately upon purchasing reason 11 I found out it was no longer compatible with Ableton 9 so I reluctantly shelled out the cash to upgrade able to 9/2 Ableton 10 then upon opening my new software I found out that about half my tracks were deleted additionally all my VST plugins were missing and my interface decided to stop communicating with my computer altogether now we've already seen that technology can be a musician's best friend but it can also be our worst enemy these sort of technical interruptions into our creative pursuits can really put the brakes on things and at worse they can even spoil your projects completely if you allow them but I'm telling you you better get used to it these sorts of technical hurdles are going to pop up over and over and over again they're nothing new and you will have to learn to develop the problem-solving skills to solve the problems and to just keep trooping through without getting too depressed but like I said this is not a new issue for as long as there's been music there has been technical hurdles there has been strings that didn't stay in tune there have been instruments that work resonant enough or that didn't you know produce the right intervals when you used to produce on tape you know you have to cut tape and slice it you only have four tracks you had you know tube amplifiers that would burn out so you know yeah is it a pain that I have to reinstall my plugins yes but there have always been technical interruptions so never let that be the excuse for why your song die because you know we've had 200 years of music production and that has never been a valid excuse we've always had the problem of tactical interruptions they will always exist so just deal with it get used to it develop the skill to troop through those problems and if it's too hard for you find some people in your life so that you can depend on that can solve those problems for you anyways with my new software finally humming along nicely I was able to get Mike's piano track finally working in my song then I was able to rerecord my missing bass guitar my missing guitar parts and redo my vocal parts with a few small changes now what I'm about to play for you isn't a full song but I will turn it into a full song and that'll be an easy transformation just a few slight modifications some judicious repetitions and we've got an entire track on her hands but I want you to keep in mind as you listen to this that says this entire track was born out of just noodling with a scale that's an important concept to keep in mind that all of these ideas can really just come about through practicing a simple scale [Music] I told you before I can tell you about the new gone away [Music] nothing our boys to say [Music] [Applause] above the mothers land to cow all of the plants must grow flying over whether humans live see how all the electrons flow but they don't know [Applause] [Music] right up please [Music] we can tell [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right now a few things before we close out first off is the bebop scale in general this is generally a jazz scale and you can hear I'm not using it for very jazzy purposes in this video and that's fine that's what style does that's what influence does you know I come from more of a rock upbringing in a progressive rock upbringing so you know as far as my musical career is concerned those are the the influences that crept in there as opposed to thinking of a jazz style if I was more jazz oriented that probably would have sound a lot jazzier but it's just important to see how two different players two different musicians can take the same set of notes and create completely different styles of music out of it so when you hear something like bebop scale I don't want you to just immediately think jazz scale yes it's a jazz scale but I don't think anything I just heard was a jazz song it just happened to utilize a jazz scale so don't pigeonhole these scales too much as far as what they're capable of you know keep in mind that you have infinite freedom as far as what you're gonna make that scale do it all so shout out to Ben Levin I'm not sure if you watch Ben Levin's YouTube channel but I'd watched a few of his videos the other day and there was really inspiring to watch I loved his his art style the the kind of music he makes how you know freeform it is and that that kind of music style was running through my head as well as you know um freeze McGee fish and I was also thinking Ben Levin his art style especially so if it feels a little Ben Lebanon I'll take that as a compliment but I know that I was definitely being influenced through his art style and his teaching style and his music style if you haven't watched this stuff it's really really enjoyable please check him out and lastly thank you to Gary Simon from Design course for making this awesome piece of software for all of us to use I just think it's excellent I think it's great that he's not charging for it you know I'm sure there's a business model attached there somewhere later on down the line but hey at least the core component of it is just free for us to use and like I said I've seen people try to attempt these things all over the place I've tried to make stuff like this and it never goes well regardless thanks to Gary Simon for making this possible and really I mean through that app I've got a new song I'm gonna finish that and turn that into a new song and that's awesome you know inspiration can come from something just like a practicing resource so I hope you enjoyed this video I hope you learn something if you enjoyed this video please thank my awesome patreon supporters for supporting and sponsoring these videos like said I don't do ads this was not an ad really my only advertisement or for the awesome people that are supporting this channel so thanks to them if you'd like to join them you can there is a link below in the description but if you can't do that I would appreciate a like or subscribe or a comment all that kind of stuff really helps me out so thanks for watching and I will see you next time [Music]

Channel: Signals Music Studio

Views: 166,234

Keywords: jake lizzio, dole mansion, crystal lake, free lesson, guitar lesson, cool guitar, play solos, how to play guitar

Id: T_YiT002Yy0

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020