Mark Wingfield – DOGMA

You want to sound original?  You think you’re going to do that by listening to your favorite players?  Its not likely.  What you play is a product of your inner emotional content filtered through musical paradigms you inhabit. This means that if you listen to a small number of players over and over again, you’re very likely to sound like them, instead of finding your own voice.

Give up listening to any of the music you usually listen to.  If you normally listen to rock or jazz, spend three months listening to nothing but Stravinsky, Stockhausen and Bartok alternatively, spend that time listening to tribal chants from Niger, Bulgarian folk and Japanese Shakuhachi music.  If you normally listen to rock and country, listen to John Coltrane, Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett.  You get the picture.  Become immersed, completely in this different music.

Spend a month or two listening to this new music every day, and don’t listen to any of your normal music.  Then pick up your guitar and play along, join in, become assimilated.  Try to play what they play. You’ll probably play rubbish.  Keep going.  Even after some time playing along, its more than likely you’ll still play half formed infantile meanderings compared to the musicians on the recordings.  Stop playing and listen to the music for another month, keeping in mind what you learned about the gaps between what you can play and what’s happening in the music.

A month later, play along again only this time play your old style to it, be that rock, jazz or whatever.  Bring your baggage into their world and dump it.  More than likely you’ll have made a hell of a mess.  Try harder.  Try to make your old style fit this new music (which shouldn’t be that new to you by now).  Take some little piece of what you find into yourself.  Continue with this for two weeks.

Next, don’t listen to anything for a month, but you must play and practice every day.  Only play unaccompanied (ie no band or backing music) and stay with what ever new ideas you picked up, don’t play any of your old style at all (not even as a warm up).  Your task is to get used to any new ideas you’ve picked up and try to extend them.

After this month is over, go back to your usual music and ways of playing for a month.  Then do the steps above again.

You will probably find that none of these new ideas come into your playing during the months that you play ‘normally’.  But don’t be disheartened, year later some little strands of originality may emerge.  You’ve found a place to start, you’ve got a foot in the door, and it will only get better from there.

There are numerous resources on the web where you can find jazz scales and lists of which scale to use for which chord. This may all seem confusing, and as if there is a vast number of scales to learn and lots of memorizing to do to know which scale fits with which chord. However this is the wrong way to look at it.

If you understand what these scales are made of (which is actually quite simple) and also how chords are constructed (which is equally simple), it will be obvious which scale fits with which chord – no memorizing will be necessary beyond that.

It’s similar with learning scales. If you understand how scales are constructed, in other words what one scale contains compared to another scale, learning them will be much easier. In understanding them this way, you’ll see that it’s not really a matter of memorizing lots of scales but more like choosing a palette of colours to paint a picture.

Learning the fingering shapes for scales is something you will have to do and this does take some practice. Learning scale shapes, like learning chord shapes, is to a large extent about practising them until they become part of “muscle memory”. In other words, your fingers just know them without you having to think about it.

However, it is important when doing this practice, that you at the same time learn what these scales contain – so that by the time your fingers know the shapes, they also know what the scales contain – without thinking about it. I’ll explain what I mean about this below.

You want to minimise thinking (eliminate it if possible) when you play. This means building in everything you need to the point where you don’t need to think about it. Getting to this stage is just a matter of the right sort of practice.

Knowing what different scales contain is important. It makes it much easier to learn them and use them. What do I mean when I talk about what a scale “contains”?

Each scale contains a set of notes, one of which is the root note. Think of the root note as your home point in the scale. Also, very importantly, realise that the root note of the scale is always the same as the root note of the chord you are playing over at the time. I can’t emphasise enough how important this last point is.

Every other note in the scale is some distance from the root note. This distance defines the sounds of each of the notes in the scale. These “distances” are called intervals.

Each interval has its own sound, and learning these sounds is probably the most important thing any player who wishes to improvise can do.

Knowing how these intervals sound when played over major, minor and dominant 7th chords, gives you the tools you need to use scales effectively. When you know these sounds, it becomes patently obvious which scale to use for which chord. It will become crystal clear, because you’ll know how each interval in the scale will sound over the chord, so it becomes very easy to choose the scale with the intervals you want to hear.

This assumes, of course that your fingers have learned the shapes, and you’ve learned where the intervals are in the shapes – which as I said earlier is very important to do as you practice the shapes.

Using the methods and tools outlined above, you can learn scales in a quick and efficient way, and you’ll know how to use them.