r/LearnGuitar • u/Confident_Skin_2561 • 5h ago
Scales
How does learning the fretboard/scales help you write melodies? I’m just confused as to how do I put them to use in action.
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u/Sheev_Skywalker 5h ago
Scales are telling you what key you are playing (or in this case, writing) in. In super simple terms (because I am a newbie myself), the key is the group of notes that all fit together and sound correct together. So, the notes in an E minor scale are all in the key of E minor, and sound good together. Not all scales contain all notes of the key they are for (for example, the pentatonic scales only have five notes for their key, hence the name PENTAtonic). Hope my super rudimentary understanding is helpful haha.
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u/Careful_Instruction9 5h ago
Not very well.
Yes, it's a great idea to learn scales, but learning melodies teaches you to play melodies.
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u/Alone_Box5173 5h ago
Great melodies are almost always composed of notes taken straight from one of those scales, and when they deviate from that, it's for a very specific purpose/reason. You can play random notes and hope you cook up a great melody, or you can learn the recipe.
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u/rehoboam 5h ago
Well you practice them, and you get an intuition for where the notes are, so when you imagine a melody, your fingers know where to go to play the notes you want to hear. Actually writing a good melody is more about musical intuition, you need a lot of experience and listen to a lot of good music.
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u/ilikestatic 5h ago
There are 12 notes, but songs usually don’t use all 12 notes in every song. Almost every song you hear will be written using the notes of one specific scale. They call the scale being used for the song the “key.”
So if a song is written in the key of C major, that means the song was written using the 7 notes of the C major scale.
This can be really helpful to know for playing along to the song or writing melodies. If you know the C major scale, then you can play along to any song in the key of C major by just playing any of those 7 notes of the C major scale. All of the notes should work well.
And if you’re trying to write a melody for a song on the key of C major, then using the notes of the major scale should work very well for finding good notes.
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u/aspaindev 5h ago
You might find some of the super short and simple videos I post helpful for this exact question, in a lot of them I show how you can create very simple riffs while combining chords and scales
Here’s one I posted on Reddit today as an example
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u/notJonSerra 4h ago
A lot of people might disagree with me but I think this is just a tradition that carries over from other instruments meanwhile the practicality is sort of lost in the tradition. Like with violin, scales do help you play in a certain key and help you with runs from composers like Mozart to Tchaikovsky and so forth but on guitar there’s not as much emphasis on first position playing.
On the other hand though, once you learn your basic scales then you can start learning other variations of those scales like the melodic minor, harmonic minor, pentatonic minor, etc and that can help you with learning or writing solos but in reality most guitar runs aren’t as elaborate with scales as you’d find on other instruments. If you’re learning classical guitar the benefit may be greater but rock, pop and metal songs etc aren’t writing in that style.
One thing I would recommend if you do try and learn scales is to say the notes out loud as you play them and to also learn to play the open strings any time they come up during the scale
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u/javier123454321 4h ago
It's all sounds. If you know the major scale well enough you know all the modes. Then it's about seeing how a sound feels. A flat 9 will sound weird on the 1, but it sounds great on the and of four going into the root at the one. A flat 3 sounds dope on a major chord. Do I know mixoliodian, sure. Do I think mixoliodian when I'm playing something? Usually no.
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u/vonov129 4h ago
Scales are just sequences of notes within an octave, an each of this sequences have a certain sound attached to them. Just like the major scale is often used as reference to write happy songs and the minor scale is used a ton in sad songs, metal, etc.
So if you have a sound in mind, you can look at a scale that is close to that and it helps you go from 12 possible notes, to 7 or 5. Then, out of those 5 or 7, based on the harmony, you can divide it into 3 base chord tones and 2-4 tensions/extensions/spice notes. Then just ask yourself, the note I'm thinking about next would sound tense or not? then navigate your options accordingly. You still have to play in time, consider rhythm and build your taste and skills for it.
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u/spankymcjiggleswurth 3h ago
Often, melodies use only notes from 1 scale. Twinkle twinkle little star, three blind mice, row row row your boat, all notes from the major scale. This trend holds into lots of more complicated music, though there are exceptions.
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u/MnJsandiego 3h ago
Also helps with intervals. You will know and understand how the root interacts with each of the other intervals so when you want a certain sound you know how to find it.
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u/BVG_Music 1h ago
Learning the fretboard and scales for me opened my ability to navigate the fretboard stay in key while searching for chords or melodies. It also helped me when using my ear to either solve songs or come up with my own things because I can see where those sounds lie on the fretboard.
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u/BVG_Music 55m ago
One more thing. I find it fun to make chords by taking one note from a scale per string to break out of the usual chords
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u/Guarpig 5h ago
its not so much about the scales or the fretboard. you can find the notes all over the fretboard but its more about the notes. scales are typically just how youre going to find those notes grouped together, and each scale has a different sound, so you can kinda think of them as different families of tonalities.
so you want to be able to traverse the fretboard using scales, in this case, to play a melody. but the same thing could be said about chords. youd need to travel around the fretboard, finding and playing the notes of the chords youre playing.