In some ways I think it depends a lot on what sort of music you want to play…like, there’s not that much point in practicing material that won’t lead you in a direction you’re interested in…but I guess like, I think I started by learning the basic major and minor chords, then the major and minor blues scales, then all the Western diatonic modes, then the whole-tone, octatonic, and chromatic scales. From there you can go all sorts of places. It helps to learn both the chords and scales up and down the neck, in each key (where applicable ), and to practice playing the scales in different patterns. This all takes lots of drilling to get in your fingers, and it’s kind of boring, but it really pays off once you’ve done it.
More than anything, I suggest practicing at least 15 m. a day, every day, without fail. It’s really important to stick with it like that when you’re just starting out. Eventually it becomes easy to practice regularly once you start to feel comfortable with the instrument and it becomes a lot fun to play, but at first it can really be kind of a slog because it feels physically awkward and hard to play anything that sounds very cool or together. You just have to stick with it and not give up. I’d say it’s the hardest in the first 6–9 months or so and it just gets continuously better after that.
yeah i’ve never made a Practice of it but knowing the diatonic scale structure and how it repeats across the fretboard is a huge boon imo. it’s one of those One Weird Tricks for real
Yeah, I wouldn’t necessarilly suggest that everyone do drills like that, too—I do feel like it depends so much on like, what sort of music you want to play, the sort of relationship you want to have with the instrument, etc. etc. I don’t do things like that very much nowadays even, it was more like in the first few years I was picking up the instrument; I remember feeling like it was hard to keep track of the different scale/chord shapes in some places on the neck in the moment while I was playing, and I felt like doing exercises like that helped me build up kind of a basic foundation. Now when I feel like I notice some place where I feel a bit hesitant or like my technique is somewhat lacking etc., I try to push myself to go there while improvising, and try to work on it that way. Usually at this point it’s something more specific and holistic I guess, more in the vein of a certain playing style or musical idea that I’m intrigued by but feel kind of shaky within, so pushing myself to improvise there ends up being a good way to get myself comfortable in that area. I usually only do, like, actual drills if there’s a specific piece or lick or something I’m trying to get down at a fast tempo.
I guess also, for someone who like, wasn’t interested at all in playing diatonic music, I wouldn’t even necessarily suggest that you learn the diatonic modes…like, if you were purely interested in playing pentatonic music, you wouldn’t necessarily need to learn any diatonic material at all (although I think most people in the English-speaking world would probably not be inclined to entirely neglect diatonic music ). Also, if you wanted to play 12-tone serialist music, you wouldn’t necessarily need to know much about diatonic music either I guess. I almost feel like, it’s sort of worth learning about on the guitar specifically just for the sake of like “overall musicianship” kind of, because the fretboard and conventional tuning of the guitar is kind of oriented around making it easy to play diatonic music. I kind of feel like, as a guitarist, even if you didn’t really want to play music like that, it wouldn’t hurt to learn at least a bit about it just because of that—it kind of makes the instrument make more sense overall I think, like you’re saying.
A brief explanation of what diatonic music is, with audio examples
Diatonic music is based around dividing the octave into seven pitches. These pitches are separated in frequency by a characteristic pattern of whole (1) and half (½) steps, 1-1-½-1-1-1-½ (with a half step typically being defined nowadays as 100 cents, but also being the distance between two adjacent frets on the guitar). Typically when playing diatonic music, you pick one of the pitches in an octave to be the root, and you would then put it first when enumerating the steps, yielding the following scales:
Steps
Modal name
1-1-½-1-1-1-½
Ionian
1-½-1-1-1-½-1
Dorian
½-1-1-1-½-1-1
Phrygian
1-1-1-½-1-1-½
Lydian
1-1-½-1-1-½-1
Mixolydian
1-½-1-1-½-1-1
Aeolian
½-1-1-½-1-1-1
Locrian
(for some reason it won’t load the audio files if I add them to the table)
Ionian:
Dorian:
Phrygian:
Lydian:
Mixolydian:
Aeolian:
Locrian:
These are commonly referred to as the “diatonic modes” or “Western modes.” The names are derived from the names of ethnic groups in Ancient Greece, but they become conventional between the Renaissance and Romantic Era in a complicated historical process, and have no precise relation to the music of those ancient ethnic groups.
Even if you don’t have prior familiarity with the modes, you might recognize the Ionian and Aeolian as the conventional major and minor scales as they commonly occur in our folk and pop music. Although, it’s worth nothing that in the music of the Common Practice Period of the European Classical tradition—roughly from Bach to Mahler—from which the concept of major and minor tonality originates, the minor scale is not handled in the same way as I played in the Aeolian mode here. Instead, when approaching and returning to the root, the seventh step of the scale is typically raised by a half step to create what’s called a “leading tone” towards the root—in other words, to create harmonic tension that pulls the music in the direction of the root, to reinforce the idea that the root is the central note or “tonic.” In concordance with this, the sixth step is typically raised a half step as well, because otherwise a minor third (three half steps) is created between the sixth and seventh steps, and stepwise motion in this musical tradition is considered to be by half or whole step only.
Music in this style is also generally considered “diatonic,” even though the raised sixth and seventh steps fall outside a strict diatonic pitch set. However, it’s fair to say that, because of this, minor key tonal music is more “chromatic” than major key tonal music (which has these sixth and seventh steps built-in). For music to be more “chromatic,” it means that it has more of a tendency to use “all the notes,” with 12-tone serialist music being “maximally chromatic” in a sense. People sometimes use “diatonic” and “chromatic” as antonyms when talking about music in the European tradition like this, and talk about passages of music as being more or less diatonic or chromatic depending on how stably the music is centered in a given key/how frequently pitches outside the key appear. However, as a general rule, it’s common to call European tonal music “diatonic” just in general even though it can be very chromatic, because the diatonic pitch set is the foundation of the musical system.
As a side note, you might wonder where the diatonic pitch set came from. If you know how to go down a fourth and up a fifth the guitar, try picking a random note on the fretboard and go down a fourth, up a fifth, down a fourth, up a fifth, etc. until you’ve played seven different notes. You will have enumerated a diatonic pitch set.
You may know that a fifth and a fourth are inversions of each other—if you take the bottom note of a fifth and raise it an octave, you get a fourth and vice versa. So, you can also construct a diatonic pitch set by continuously going up by fifth and then bringing each successive note down into the same octave. The fifth is a very important interval because it corresponds to the third harmonic, making it the most stable interval next to the octave (which is hardly an interval at all in a sense because it’s kind of the same note twice). This is also the acoustic reason why the V-I cadence plays such a central role in tonal music. These are other topics though. One thing you might note with interest even here, though, is that if you follow this process and stop at five notes instead of seven, you get a pentatonic pitch set instead, and if you keep going all the way up to 12 notes, you cover the traditional 12-note chromatic scale (albeit in a different tuning, Pythagorean, than the one people typically use nowadays, 12-TET). You can also keep going past 12 and make up pitch sets used in Indian, Persian, and Arabic classical music styles (although those musical traditions don’t quite have the same concept of “scale” that music in the European tradition does).
In general, I guess, for anyone interested in learning any instrument kinda, I would say it really helps a lot to learn some music theory from whatever tradition the instrument is from—it really helps to clarify, like, the rationale behind how the instrument is constructed, what sort of things you can easily do with it, what you might want to develop your technique around, etc. etc.
On a bizarro whim, I ordered an Emu Mo Phatt (a rompler designed only for jock jams) a couple weeks back, and just scored a loose Proteus 2000 rom for its expansion slot.
I don’t know why the hubbub was always that these things weren’t cool. The canned sounds sound amazing, you have just enough control over them that it doesn’t feel like just yamaha or casio keyboard. I feel like you can cobble together some pretty basic retro soundtracky tunes on this with minimal effort. Might be my first serious foray into using a computer as a MIDI host.
i picked up replacement pots for my P-Bass at guitar center, and some white speed knobs to go on them. I noticed there wasn’t a board full of flyers for local shows and other flyers of seeking musicians to join bands. Feels like we’ve lost something
thinking about upgrading the pickups on my epiphone sheraton to a humbucker sized p90. maybe lollar or fralin? or should i just start with a cheapo set? not sure, i’d be paying for installation from a tech near me anyway
cheaper than buying a whole new guitar, probably. thinking about this julian lage tone which is a hollowbody with dynasonic-type p90s, he also has dynasonic-type pickups on his ‘nachocaster’ tele
coward, pickup swaps are a piece of piss
fralin and lollar both storied and reliable; i bought a savage P90 from manlius without complaints, it lives in my homemade esquire
I’ve been playing the same passive 4 string jazz for like 18 years now, but I’ve been feeling the itch to buy or build a much dumber bass. considering: 5 string, fretless, filter preamp, probably pj or with humbuckers, idk what else. I tried a million basses at chuck levin’s, which while fun didn’t really help with any decisions. the current crop of music mans and spectors feel incredible! fenders, incredibly underwhelming!
right yeah this is the direction I’m thinking! partly cause I’ve been very into like mick karn / paul webb type tones and they both played wals with filter preamps
im an old timer who loves jack casady but im unsure if any of the sounds i like are guild starfire w/bisonics or proto-alembic or real or if alembic’s electronics were anything but “active eq” at that point (67-68) but i love a cocked-wah type mess of mids on guitar as well so it doesn’t really matter
speaking of psych bass geniuses, rip steve kille :(((
yeah guitars but it’s crazy how boring fender is right now. it’s just all overpriced for what it is nowadays… like why don’t they focus on building better workhorse teles and strats instead of 800 useless signature editions? why don’t they get better hardware and pickups into lower cost models? I guess that doesn’t provide enough margin… but like, they could build a good ass reputation…
not like Gibson is much better lol. it’s hard to consider off the shelf guitars as much more than platforms for mods now… I understand what ppl on here were trying to tell me years ago
it would be ez except this is a semi hollow body and I can’t solder and don’t have any tools for that type of thing. probably just smarter to let someone professional do it
I feel like that one gets a natural boost cause starcasters are generally cool! but yeah I agree with stylo, with fender now it feels like off-the-shelf options aren’t super compelling, so you’re probably going to mod it at some point, and because there aren’t clear differences in build quality between the player / american performer / american pro lines you’ve got to spend time playing a bunch to find a good one or roll the dice online. if you’re after a platform and thf focusing on stuff that’s harder to change like neck carve, weight and balance, looks, there’s not like a good legible price/value situation.
), and to practice playing the scales in different patterns. This all takes lots of drilling to get in your fingers, and it’s kind of boring, but it really pays off once you’ve done it.
