The Musical Genie: Three Rules To Make Your Wish Come True

If a musical genie appeared and offered to grant one music-related wish, what would you wish for? Don’t even try the “I’d wish for a thousand wishes” answer because you don’t need more than one: to be able to play whatever you want.

Isn’t that what every musician is striving for? Creating at the speed of inspiration is what makes “flow” happen. I slyly declare to my students that their ultimate wish has been answered: we simply need to practice playing our instruments without making mistakes.

In the previous article, “The Uninterrupted Performance,” I made the case for focusing more on timing, regardless of an increase in wrong notes, in order to achieve a more accurate self-evaluation of proficiency. However, without additional exercises to counteract the Uninterrupted Performance, students can become complacent with melodic and harmonic inaccuracies.

Please note that while this particular example focuses on scales, it can also be applied to sight reading and even improvisation, on which I plan to write separate articles. When they are available, I’ll link them here. 

I’ll begin with three rules: Don’t memorize scales; understand every note; and NEVER make a mistake. Then I’ll give some advice on creating exercises that can get students closer to fulfilling their wish.

Rule #1: Don’t memorize scales

At first, this sounds as if I am discouraging the study of scales altogether. There are certainly a number of musicians and instructors who hate practicing scales. And while I do understand how someone could develop this animosity it is not what I am advocating. 

A big problem with scales is that they are often taught simply as warm-ups or with the sole purpose of memorization. In my experience, although every instrumentalist is guilty of this in one way or another, guitarists are the most likely to memorize scales without actually understanding their connections to the music they are playing. This may be because of the confusing layout of the notes on the fingerboard. In a way, the guitar is like playing five differently transposed instruments. A piano keyboard, on the other hand, is much more linear. You can see the relationship between a scale and chord very easily. 

Although these rules apply to any instrument, it is the seemingly arbitrary blueprint of the guitar fingerboard which makes for a perfect case study.  Guitarists often learn what a scale looks like on the fretboard, memorize it, and expect to get better. But, you end up sounding the way you practice. And if you practice scales as if they are mindless tasks, your hard work will result in musical ideas that will sound as if they came out of a method book.

So instead of memorizing scales, the goal should be to construct them: if the student has never played an A-flat Lydian Dominant scale in their life, they should be able to build it note by note on their first try while correctly predicting the sound of each note. My advice? Take that copy of The Illustrated Encyclopedia of 500 Bazillion Scales and throw it in a bonfire. If you don’t know what an A-flat Lydian Dominant scale is, then you shouldn’t be practicing it. 

I admit, there is a bit of a fallacy to this rule: in the end every student will end up memorizing a scale. It’s virtually impossible to prevent it from happening. If a human being does something a few hundred times, their brain is going to efficiently accomplish the task. Simply knowing what the scale looks like on the instrument is the route that it’s going to take.

What I’m encouraging is holding off on that memorization for as long as possible. As soon as the student has the scale memorized, the opportunity to practice the logic is lost.

Rule #2: Understand every note

I want my student thinking of everything: where the whole-steps are, where the half-steps are, what the scale is going to sound like, which scale degree they are on in the scale, which notes make up the triadic chord tones, and every nuance in between. It’s those ideas, thoughts, and definitions that I want them to be faster at recalling–not the scale itself.

The major scale, for example, can  be divided into two categories: triadic chord tones (1, 3, 5) and tensions (2, 4, 6, and 7). This is nothing new to the average contemporary music instructor. But many students learn the distinction much later then they should. Why not right away?

To demonstrate the difference between these two groups, a simple test can be performed. In my experience, regardless of the students’ age, experience, or skill level, the outcome is usually the same. First, I play a chord and then a single note an octave higher than the chord. I ask the student to say “in” if they think the note belongs to the chord or “out” if they think the note doesn’t belong to the chord.

Generally, they are correct nine out of ten times. This is because whether someone is a trained musician or layman, we all hear the music virtually the same way. Nobody has to take a class on listening to music.

Rule #3: NEVER make a mistake 

Here is what I hope the inner monologue of a student sounds like when playing an A-flat Dorian scale. Many readers will give up halfway through the following passage as a result of boredom. If you are a teacher I encourage you to read every word so you understand what you are asking of the student.

“I’ll start on A-flat. Good. Now, I know that Dorian has a flat-third and a flat-seventh. So I’ll go to the next note of the scale, the second. That’s a whole step. B-flat. Okay, now normally I would go up another whole step if this was a major scale. Right? Wait, it’s whole, whole, half, whole, whole, whole, half. So whole. Whole? Is that right? I gotta think about the C major scale for a second… Okay… Yes. That’s right. Okay, so I’m on what note now? The… the second note, so a half-step to the minor third. Okay. Great. Now a half step to fou– wait, no! That’s not right. It would have been a half step to the fourth, but it was a flat third, so I need to go up a whole step… ah okay. Whole step to the fifth. Whole step to the sixth. Next one is easy. Half step to a flat-seventh. Ah ha! And the root is right where I started. Whole-step up. But it’s usually a half… but flat seven. So whole. Yeah. That’s an A-flat!”

Getting a student to put that much thought into playing a scale can be very challenging. Especially with a metronome clicking away. In the example above there are over forty thoughts for just eight notes. And that is just for playing a scale up and down. But eventually, that number should come down. Not because the scale is memorized, but because the general knowledge of building a scale, or a sound, is improved. And ala kazaam! Wish granted.

Creating musical genie-inspired exercises

In order to make this happen, there are a number of exercises that can be used. Linear exercises that create ascending and descending patterns (1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 4, 3, 4, 5, etc.) are useful but quickly become a bit too intuitive. It’s easy to continue patterns without actually knowing what notes you are on. Non-linear scalar patterns are a bit more demanding, forcing the student to add intervallic concepts to their exercises (playing 1, 4, 3, 6, of each mode or key). However, a piano student might find the patterns still a little too easy to visualize on the keyboard. And guitarists may not find the patterns challenging enough if they continue to use the same scale shape. 

In my book, The Guitarist’s Palette: Volume I - Diatonic Scales, I outline a method that demands that the student know the scale inside and out: where the chord tones are, where the tensions are, and how to manipulate the chord tones and tensions to create tension and resolution. It is designed to improve the ear, add more freedom to improvisation, and augment sight-reading abilities. However, it will require its own article, which I plan to do in the near future.

The gist of the method is this (which anyone can make up exercises for): every part of the scale exercises depend on understanding the relationship between chord tones and tensions. First we play the scale up and down. As soon as the student becomes a bit too comfortable with the exercise (committing it to memory) we play only the chord tones (aka arpeggios). Then we approach each one of those chord tones from the tension above or below (2 resolves to 1, 4 resolves to 3, 6 resolves to 5 and so on). The method can be expanded to surrounding the chord tones, approaching chromatically, and so on. Once the student can recall any note on demand, they can begin introducing techniques to commit the scale to memory. You know they are ready once you ask for any scale degree and they play it back instantly. 

Any exercises that are designed with the relationship between the chord tones and tensions as the center of focus will demand that the student to keep track of where they are. In addition, having students play random scales alongside a structured approach, such as going through keys via the circle of fifths or fourths, can be effective. However, it is important to remember that the students should aim to not make a single mistake. They must think about everything they are doing and aim for accuracy, ideally, with a metronome at a slow tempo, forcing them to slow down during parts of the exercise that they find easy and speed up parts of the exercise they find difficult, in order to sew up any holes in their knowledge. 

In this way, a more enriched connection between harmony, melody, ear training, musicianship, sight-reading, improvisation, theory, and technique is forged. It’s a lot of work, but it’s important. Playing a scale without knowing what makes up the scale is equivalent to learning a list of words in a foreign language without knowing what the words mean. You might be able to rattle off some sounds, but you may not be expressing your ideas accurately. And in that way, the Musical Genie can never fulfill the ultimate wish.