Todd Pertll
From:
Chicago, Illinois, USA
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Posted 3 Nov 2005 6:09 am |
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This may be old news, but it is new to me.
I was reading an interview with Bela Fleck and he mentioned that scales will show up in your playing the way you practice them. So, to make them more intersting he deals with groups of 5 notes. I tried it last night on Dobro and it really made a difference. Boring exercises started sounding musical.
I started with the major scale and played, scale degrees: 1,2,3,4,5 then 6,5,4,3,2 then 3,4,5,6,7 then 8,7,6,5,4 and so on.
All notes got equal length. I started playing them as eigth notes with the metronome. Then slowed the metronome down and played them all as 16th notes. The greatest challenge was trying not to tie the beginning of each phrase to a down beat.
if you dont already do this, try it and let me know what you think. I was having a blast doing it last night. Especailly when I started getting it more up to speed.
todd |
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Les Anderson
From:
The Great White North
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Posted 3 Nov 2005 10:22 am
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Todd, if you keep that type of practice ongoing, you are going to advance much, much faster than the players who focus primarily on fancy licks and complicated chord progressions. There is no replacement for continually working on the basices. In truth, I have yet to see a house being built without a good foundation supporting it.
There is another factor in this that you may or may not have considered. Speed picking those scales with blocking to assure there is no overlapping. If you want to learn blocking, this is the place to practice the art.
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(I am not right all of the time but I sure like to think I am!)
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