How important are scales and theory in your guitar playing?

[miroslav]

The tabs are almost always very wrong, too.

TBH...they could be completely wrong...they could be to the wrong song...and I wouldn't be able to tell.
Well, OK...if I really took the time to look, but like I said, tabs make me go cross-eyed.
Just never saw the tabs method as a useful tool for anything I wanted to learn...of course, my music learning came from a time before tabs were used...some young'uns probably find them very useful.

Maybe I'm just missing how great they really are.

There's a lot of wrong stuff on many of those guitar tab/chord sites. I mean, you see like 3 versions of a song, and no one really got it 100% right.
But I gotta give some credit for the effort to the guys who painstakingly sit there and write out tabs...finger-by-finger, fret-by-fret.

There was a time...a long time ago...when after coming up with a new song, I would actually write it out in proper music notation on music manuscript paper...but then I got lazy, and when I wrote a new song, I would just write out the lyrics and chords, and the melody was only in my head.
These days, if I tried to write it out...it would probably be easier to do it as a tab!

 

[famous beagle]

scales are a part of music theory... and knowing music theory goes a long way...towards composition writing, arranging, etc. hap hazzard chord hopping to find what works is a waste of time. i have seen manyfriends try to be "songwriters" but have no idea what goes where when it comes to music theory. they have no idea why a chord would be called
" AUGMENTED 13th" and so on...they hear wierd chords and can't figure them out due to poor ear training and lack of music theory...you need to know what chords are major , minor, 7th, diminished in a given key scale ...you would need to know in the key of C major that the number 2 chord is a " d Minor" and so on ...you must first know scales to know your dominant, subdominant and resolving chords......i was a music education major at Missouri Baptist University... play various instruments besides the guitar...so not bragging but i do know what i am talking about... if anyone wishes to learn anything i would be happy to share what knowledge i do have with anyone...can look me up on Face book under Kevin Henderson ( look for the guy with the cowboy hat ) LOL

Well ... you don't need to know any of that unless you want to. Here's a brief list of people who didn't/don't know that stuff, and it didn't seem to hold them back much:

The Beatles
Elvis Presley
Jimi Hendrix
Michael Jackson
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Kurt Cobain

I could go on...

Maybe you've heard of a few of them?

 

[Tootler]

I'll tell you the thing about guitar "theory" (I don't think it really has anything to do with theory) that makes me go cross-eyed...

...are guitar tabs.

While I understand what they do and how they are used...every time I go online to find the chords for some song I heard, and I get to a webpage with tabs...I always go...WTF?

I mean...the whole idea of teaching/learning how to play each chord and note to a song by looking at finger numbers on a string/fret layout...makes me laugh, and at the same time cringe.
I've seen entire 5 minute guitar solos from songs transcribed into tabs.
I guess some people can only learn by being told what string/fret to put each finger on...but I find that weird.
I mean, the time it takes to learn that, you might as well learn the actual chords notes and use your ears instead of a numbered finger chart....and also use your common sense about where to put each finger, based on what is both consider "right", and what is most comfortable to you.

Anyway...there was no such thing back in the day, and it wasn't really until maybe 10-15 years back when I first started seeing that on the net, though it might go back further than that, and I just missed it because I wasn't looking for chords to song on the internet...but now, it's sometimes hard to find the chords to a song!
I'll hit 5 sites and they all just have fucking tabs! I end up just figuring out the chords by ear.
Like doesn't anyone actually learn chords and notes and basics anymore?

I see them as cheap crutch, and some people who learn that way, can then only "read music" in tab form.

Tabs are nothing new at all. In past times, the standard way of writing music for plucked strings was tab and there were a variety of conventions for writing tab. Practically all the renaissance lute music that has survived is in tab. Early organ music was in tab. It's simply an alternative way of writing down music that has a history as long as standard notation which was originally conceived purely for writing down vocal music.

 

[miroslav]

Tabs are nothing new at all. In past times, the standard way of writing music for plucked strings was tab and there were a variety of conventions for writing tab. Practically all the renaissance lute music that has survived is in tab. Early organ music was in tab. It's simply an alternative way of writing down music that has a history as long as standard notation which was originally conceived purely for writing down vocal music.

In the many years I took both guitar and piano lessons, from various teachers, including some jazz guitar at the college level...
...not a one ever mentioned or used tabs, nor were they ever discussed in any theory classes (maybe in some music history class...I musta slept through that).


Like I already said, tabs may have been around longer than my awareness of them...but I only noticed them HEAVILY in use the last 10-15 years whenever I go to some "learn-this-song" guitar site, trying to find the chords to some songs.
When I was younger, and a bunch of us would get together to play guitar and/or learn some songs...there was not a single player who ever mentioned or used tabs. No one ever broke out some paper with tabs written on it...so I see the heavy tab use trend as something fairly "new".
I just assume that for those who have zero music theory knowledge...tabs make it easy to write down and read notes/chords...
...but they still make me go cross-eyed.

 

[famous beagle]

Whatever...
In the many years I took both guitar and piano lessons, from various teachers, including some jazz guitar at the college level...
...not a one ever mentioned or used tabs, nor were they ever discussed in any theory classes (maybe in some music history class...I musts slept through that).


Like I said, tabs may have been around longer than my awareness of them...but I only noticed them HEAVILY in use the last 10-15 whenever I go to some "learn-this-song" guitar site, trying to find the chords to some songs.
When I was younger, and a bunch of us would get together to play guitar and/or learn some songs...there was not a single player who ever mentioned or used tabs.

Well, I can't speak to before my time (other than that, yes, tab is as old as the hills and has been around for centuries), but I do know that by the mid-eighties---when I started learning guitar---it was in full swing and was ubiquitous in the rock world. All of the guitar mags of the day (Guitar for the Practicing Musician, Guitar Player, Guitar World, etc.), had their songs notated in tab along with standard notation, and my teacher pretty much tabbed everything out. And I don't know how far back it went, but every back issue I've seen from one of those magazines (from the early 80s and maybe into the 70s) had the same.

Now ... when I went to college, there was no tab in classical (of course) or jazz studies. But before then, I (and pretty much every guitar player I knew) could definitely read tab, and many players could only read tab (and not standard notation). Because I was a music nerd, I taught myself to read music on guitar, but most of my friends were tab-only.

 

[miroslav]

Regardless of timelines and history...I know that tabs were not in much use during the '70s and even into the early '80s AFAIK...they were never mentioned by any player that I knew, and we played a lot back then.
After that, I honestly wasn't paying much attention, and I wasn't really a "guitar mag" reader then or now.
Once we got into the Internet heavily from the late '90s, I remember seeing tabs in the early 2k's online, and at first paid them little mind, but as time went by I noticed they were everywhere on guitar sites.

So I think it's fair to say that with the explosion of the internet, and the "everyone think's they can be a rock star" mentality, fueled by the digital technologies and promoted by YouTube and American Idol...etc...many more people started wanting to be musicians, but not as many actually bothered to learn music and theory and all that, or bothered to take formal lessons... especially when it comes to guitar. That's always been "THE" symbol of Rock music so a lot of kids wanted to pick one up, and it stands to reason then that tabs would be the preferred method of learning songs and leads and chords for many of those folks who wanted to bypass the lessons and the theory.

I'm sure if I was growing up through the '90s or '00s...I would be using tabs too.
I still think it's nuts writing out extensive solos from classic Rock songs as tabs...and then someone learning them by placing numbered fingers on numberd frets...but I guess it's one way to get there.

Back in the day, when we wanted to learn some popular song, and if there was no written notes or chords for it...we just listened to it and pulled it off by ear.
I guess that might seem more nuts to some kids today who use tabs, than tabs seem to me.

 

[famous beagle]

Back in the day, when we wanted to learn some popular song, and if there was no written notes or chords for it...we just listened to it and pulled it off by ear.
I guess that might seem more nuts to some kids today who use tabs, than tabs seem to me.

It would certainly serve them well. Transcribing works wonders for developing your ear!

 

[idanaltman]

when you're starting out - very important. when you've played so long that you forgot what scale you're playing - not so much haha

 

[rob aylestone]

Here's a brief list of people who didn't/don't know that stuff
The Beatles
Elvis Presley
Jimi Hendrix
Michael Jackson
Stevie Ray Vaughan
Kurt Cobain

I've heard this many times before, and it's worthy of some rebuffment - despite what they actually said. If you study music theory, you learn new vocabulary, and sets of rules that get stuck to, unless you know better. The rules are complex, the vocabulary damn hard and most of it has links to physics too.

Modes are the one that always get talked about. People having to learn the names of the different scales as if the name is important. Most self-taught musicians start with the key of C. C, G and D are the ones guitarists often get from books, when for much of our music from the 50's onwards would have been more handy as E, A, B and D. People bang on about modes when they just define things differently. Very often when people learn them, they learn them in isolation, with no link to anything. I remember a young friend of mine proudly telling his mate he had learned the G Mixolydian scale. I said I only knew the C Ionian one. Being a smartarse I milked this for all it was worth.

The upshot is that most self-taught musicians know Majors and minors, they know 7ths - both kinds eventually. They usually know what a 6th is, and Perfect 5ths are everyday stuff for the chuggers. They just don't know the words - they know the sound. The people in that list new this stuff, they used it in the stuff they wrote, they just didn't know they knew this stuff as it came to them because they are musicians.

Knowing all the modes so you can play them solo, as a scale is not really very musical. It's memory and maths. The folk who stand in and just ask what the first chord is, or what key it is are the good ones. Somebody says slow blues in Bb, and they can play it. I bet if you suddenly froze time half way through the song, they'd have to look at their hands, count the frets and say after a pause, Eb - even though they just played it perfectly. Happens to me all the time. We're perhaps playing through and suddenly the keys guy says "after you play the C through to the Eb, can you go down quickly to an E - and I don't even remember playing C to Eb. If he suddenly throws out a sequence of note names I'm lost. If I say can you play it, and he does, I know exactly what to do. The intervals and fret positions are in my head. I don't play by note names, often never looking at the fretboard at all as I'm singing and cannot look down. I navigate by finger memory. When I get a job reading, I play the notes and then often get to the end of a song and have no memory at all of what I just played.

I bet Kurt Cobain knew loads of sequences of notes he used regularly, and just didn't know what their correct names and terms were - he just used them because they sounded right!

 

[famous beagle]

I've heard this many times before, and it's worthy of some rebuffment - despite what they actually said. If you study music theory, you learn new vocabulary, and sets of rules that get stuck to, unless you know better. The rules are complex, the vocabulary damn hard and most of it has links to physics too.

Modes are the one that always get talked about. People having to learn the names of the different scales as if the name is important. Most self-taught musicians start with the key of C. C, G and D are the ones guitarists often get from books, when for much of our music from the 50's onwards would have been more handy as E, A, B and D. People bang on about modes when they just define things differently. Very often when people learn them, they learn them in isolation, with no link to anything. I remember a young friend of mine proudly telling his mate he had learned the G Mixolydian scale. I said I only knew the C Ionian one. Being a smartarse I milked this for all it was worth.

The upshot is that most self-taught musicians know Majors and minors, they know 7ths - both kinds eventually. They usually know what a 6th is, and Perfect 5ths are everyday stuff for the chuggers. They just don't know the words - they know the sound. The people in that list new this stuff, they used it in the stuff they wrote, they just didn't know they knew this stuff as it came to them because they are musicians.

Knowing all the modes so you can play them solo, as a scale is not really very musical. It's memory and maths. The folk who stand in and just ask what the first chord is, or what key it is are the good ones. Somebody says slow blues in Bb, and they can play it. I bet if you suddenly froze time half way through the song, they'd have to look at their hands, count the frets and say after a pause, Eb - even though they just played it perfectly. Happens to me all the time. We're perhaps playing through and suddenly the keys guy says "after you play the C through to the Eb, can you go down quickly to an E - and I don't even remember playing C to Eb. If he suddenly throws out a sequence of note names I'm lost. If I say can you play it, and he does, I know exactly what to do. The intervals and fret positions are in my head. I don't play by note names, often never looking at the fretboard at all as I'm singing and cannot look down. I navigate by finger memory. When I get a job reading, I play the notes and then often get to the end of a song and have no memory at all of what I just played.

I bet Kurt Cobain knew loads of sequences of notes he used regularly, and just didn't know what their correct names and terms were - he just used them because they sounded right!

Right. I agree with you wholeheartedly on this. And I've been saying this type of thing a lot. The "stuff" that I was talking about in the list of folks was just the names and labels of everything. As you've pointed out, the sound is much more important. And most of those people are/were familiar with many different sounds, as can clearly be evidenced when you look at their writing, etc.

 

[miroslav]

I've heard this many times before, and it's worthy of some rebuffment - despite what they actually said. If you study music theory, you learn new vocabulary, and sets of rules that get stuck to, unless you know better. The rules are complex, the vocabulary damn hard and most of it has links to physics too.

Modes are the one that always get talked about. People having to learn the names of the different scales as if the name is important. Most self-taught musicians start with the key of C. C, G and D are the ones guitarists often get from books, when for much of our music from the 50's onwards would have been more handy as E, A, B and D. People bang on about modes when they just define things differently. Very often when people learn them, they learn them in isolation, with no link to anything. I remember a young friend of mine proudly telling his mate he had learned the G Mixolydian scale. I said I only knew the C Ionian one. Being a smartarse I milked this for all it was worth.

The upshot is that most self-taught musicians know Majors and minors, they know 7ths - both kinds eventually. They usually know what a 6th is, and Perfect 5ths are everyday stuff for the chuggers. They just don't know the words - they know the sound. The people in that list new this stuff, they used it in the stuff they wrote, they just didn't know they knew this stuff as it came to them because they are musicians.

Knowing all the modes so you can play them solo, as a scale is not really very musical. It's memory and maths. The folk who stand in and just ask what the first chord is, or what key it is are the good ones. Somebody says slow blues in Bb, and they can play it. I bet if you suddenly froze time half way through the song, they'd have to look at their hands, count the frets and say after a pause, Eb - even though they just played it perfectly. Happens to me all the time. We're perhaps playing through and suddenly the keys guy says "after you play the C through to the Eb, can you go down quickly to an E - and I don't even remember playing C to Eb. If he suddenly throws out a sequence of note names I'm lost. If I say can you play it, and he does, I know exactly what to do. The intervals and fret positions are in my head. I don't play by note names, often never looking at the fretboard at all as I'm singing and cannot look down. I navigate by finger memory. When I get a job reading, I play the notes and then often get to the end of a song and have no memory at all of what I just played.

I bet Kurt Cobain knew loads of sequences of notes he used regularly, and just didn't know what their correct names and terms were - he just used them because they sounded right!

In addition to all you said (which I agree with)...I'll just add that in some ways, I think focusing on which mode or even which scale...ends up being more of a limitation than a benefit...unless...you're so deep into all that theory, and you can recite it in your sleep, so that even though you *know* the mode, the scale, the notes...you're still able to play "beyond that knowledge", and just focus on the music.
What I mean is that for the less than deep theorists...when you kinda focus on "what mode am I in"...it can box you in, same as when people focus on the pentatonic "boxes" they play on the fretboard.

While I do know what key a song is in and which scale might be appropriate...I prefer to try and stretch that somewhat and go outside of those boxes, and by not focusing on "what mode am I in"...I'm just playing what sounds good and I'm finding new ways to approach some things where otherwise I would be just sticking the that known scale or mode that works.
Lately I've been finding "new notes" when I'm just jamming to some well worn backing tracks...notes that wouldn't fall into any "appropriate" scale or mode category, but they can work when phrased in, in a certain way. Notes that individually just sound out of key...and they are...but strung in with the "right" notes a certain way, they give a different flavor to the lines....and frankly, I have not yet even bothered to try and theoretically figure out WTF I'm actually playing.

TBH...I'm finding that for a lot of Rock/Pop stuff where one might go for a typical pentatonic blues scale or a major scale...it's possible to play almost all the notes in-between and make them work...with maybe just 1-2 that will simply never fit. What I mean is...there's a lot you can do outside of those typical scales where normally one might feel obligated to stick to them because they know it's this scale and this mode...etc.
A deep theorist could probably stand there and tell me..."You're playing this...and now you're playing that"...but OK, I don't get anything from that or feel any more inspired. Sometimes if you know what is "appropriate" ...what scale and mode, and notes...then you may not try anything beyond that.

We all develop our own perspectives of what we are playing...even if we don't know are give names to it...and as long as you know the basics of some theory, when someone yells out the first chord, you're going to know what to play, and certainly by the 3rd or 4th chord there will be little doubt...even if you have no idea what the proper names are of what you are playing.
Deep theory is great when everyone in the room is also deep into it...and then THAT is the language used for music communication...but I think even the guys who have no idea about basic theory, often find a way to communicate when they play together a few times.

 

[Robus]

There's just no substitute for knowing your scales. Theory more broadly, I couldn't say. I don't know much of it apart from the how to build standard and color chords and which chords generally go with which tones in a scale. Here is one thing any player ought to learn to do, automatically and effortlessly: Play a major scale starting and finishing on any degree in that scale. Whether you want to talk of "modes" or whatever, if you can visualize and play the major scale from any degree, you've already unlocked a lot of fretboard knowledge.

For example, I can play a major scale treating G as the root. I know that E is the sixth degree of that scale, and that if I play all the notes in the G major scale starting and ending at E, I've also just played E natural minor. I know I can build other minor scales by starting on the second (A), third (B), or seventh (F#) degree of that G major scale. And I can build other major scales starting on the fourth (C) or fifth (D) degree.

And I can treat any one of those degrees as the root of its own corresponding minor or major scale, and build out a chord progression around it, using the notes and chords in the G major scale.

I struggle to remember the names of the modes. But the stuff I just mentioned is super useful knowledge that comes into play every single day, in playing and writing songs.

 

[andrushkiwt]

Once we got into the Internet heavily from the late '90s, I remember seeing tabs in the early 2k's online, and at first paid them little mind, but as time went by I noticed they were everywhere on guitar sites.

From 92'-96' I had subscriptions for Guitar World and other mags, and all for the tabs. I didn't see a reason to memorize notation, and tab is no different than it really. Just another set of symbols dictating a piece of music. I already know numbers - why memorize another set of keys?

Is there anything that separates notation from tab? The measures and tempo are there in tab, so is there another element missing? Genuinely asking - I grew up on tabs, so I'm not familiar with notation. I told my teacher back in 91' forget the notation (I was 9, lol), I just want to learn punk and rock songs.

 

[Nola]

Well, if you've never heard the song before, tabs aren't helpful at all because they just tell you where to put your fingers, not how long to hold them there. Notation gives time duration of each note, so it's much more valuable. Though, to do that you have to learn note and rest duration and the notes of both staffs. So, it takes a lot more time and effort.

I'd say if you never plan to play others music without hearing it then you don't really need notation, though one could argue it still helps with subdivision (I'd argue you're better off learning rudimentary drums to learn how to subdivide, though).

 

[rob aylestone]

I can't do tab at all, apart from working through, one finger at a time. Just because I grew up on the other system. You could argue conventional notation lacks the ability to say where to play it on the neck, which it does - and sometimes it takes a while to work out the best way, and indeed your best could be different from my best. They're just different, and do slightly different things. Tab is more precise in how to play it, but conventional notation is more precise in cases where different notes are played for different times. Notation flows, and tab is blocks joined up. In honesty, it's what you find best isn't it. Some conventional folk have real trouble with drum notation because it has multiple things on the same line. Doesn't cause a drummer an issue though. Conventional notion also requires a memory - because the notion that a D might not be a D but a Db because a few bars back there was a symbol telling you so always seemed a very strange way to do it.

 

[famous beagle]

What I grew up with --- i.e., guitar mags in the mid 80s onward --- always combined a tab staff with a standard notation staff, so you had not only the fret locations but also the rhythmic duration of all the notes. So that's what I'm used to, and that's still the standard for most guitar magazines these days---has been for a long time.

Now ... the stuff you see on the internet everywhere that's just submitted by anyone and everyone ... yeah that's mostly just tab.

When I went to UNT, my sight-reading improved dramatically, because tab was nowhere to be found. In classical guitar, they have clues in the notation to tell you where notes are on the neck, but when doing things like reading melodies to jazz standards and such (which we did often at UNT), you're on your own to place the notes on the neck. I got good at scanning the whole piece of music to get a sense of the range and to make a plan of which position(s) I was going to use.

I tell you what ... some of the folks there were just the most amazing sight-readers I've ever seen. I knew a sax player from the 1 o'clock lab band (the top level band in the jazz school), and she told me that she typically reads about 6 or 7 measures ahead of what she's actually playing! Granted, she only ever reads single notes (not chords), but it still seems like an unreal feat, especially considering the complexity of the music she's reading. And her performances would certainly corroborate her claim, as her precision was simply unreal.

 

[famous beagle]

Conventional notion also requires a memory - because the notion that a D might not be a D but a Db because a few bars back there was a symbol telling you so always seemed a very strange way to do it.

It certainly is whatever works best for you.

However, IMO, not using key signatures would be equally strange if not more so. Using a key signature lets the performer know the key of the piece, so it's not really as if you have to remember that a D should be Db. Once you know the key of the song, then you adjust accordingly, and your framework changes.

Think of the alternative. If no key signatures were used, then first of all ... you wouldn't know what key the song was in, unless it was written with the tempo maybe. That's an alternate method, which seems plausible. But, the issue would then be, when in keys with a lot of sharps or flats---like E major for instance (4 sharps)---you're going to have a pretty cluttered manuscript. Not only that, but for me, the biggest benefit of using key signatures is that it helps those accidentals stand out (much like bold or italic print ) and signal you that something different is there.

If you don't use a key signature, and you're in E, for example, then a sharp on an A note (which is normally natural in E) wouldn't stand out as much against all the other sharps on F, C, G, and D that are already there. By using a key signature, though, those accidentals are much easier to recognize, IMO.

That's the way I see it, anyway.

 

[Meclazine]

This comes down to what you want to do.

If you want a particular sound involving jazz improvisation and knowing melody lines over certain harmonic intervals, then scales and music theory will be important.

If you are playing bass for a Jimmy Reed or AC-DC cover band,......... not so much.

I like learning music theory in stages.

 

[vwcsonic]

I remember when I went to music school (a long time ago), one teacher said to us "Learn everything you can about music theory, and then try to forget it all and just go play." I thought it was one of the most insightful things I heard back then.

I did learn a lot about music theory and I have forgotten most of it at this point, but sometimes when I need it, it comes back.

Like when you're jamming with some folks and someone says "hey, move that up a whole step," or whatever. Or just knowing your intervals, or your scales, or blah, blah. It gets in the way if you focus on it too much, but it bites you in the ass if you don't have that foundation laid somewhere in the memory banks to go back to.

 

[nethanpaul]

I also agree that theory is very important to learn anything from the depth.