Scales and theory matter. Get the foundation..When it comes to scales and theory, I know a lot of people will say things like “but come on. Sean-David, does it really matter? Do I really have to know all my scales? I can play music great without knowing them.” And in some cases, you possibly may be right in that some musicians may be able to play the music that they want to play capably without that foundation. 

But let me explain some very key examples that are incredibly common where not knowing your scales well, ends up presenting as a serious problem. 

Sight reading

Sight reading is incredibly important, especially today’s economy of music. Most professional musicians today will earn a significant part of their living playing music that they likely have never seen before the day of the performance or recording. If you do not know your scales, you also will not know the keys associated with them. What that means is if you’re reading music for the first time and it’s in a challenging key or scale that you do not know well, or even worse, it changes keys rapidly, you will likely miss notes, possibly many. Perhaps they key or scale changes in the middle of a phrase, you’re definitely going to miss notes. You’re going to miss notes because you either literally don’t know them at all, or how to read them, or you don’t realize that they are a part of the key and so you play a sharp where it needed to be natural or natural where it need to be to flat, etc.

Improvisation

Here’s another common issue and I see this all the time. This is NOT exclusive to jazz music at all, even though that’s a huge part of what I teach and improvisation is a major part of jazz. Many musicians want to learn how to improvise (as they should). Whether it be a piano player who wants to be able to play in a pop, rock, country, or gospel environment, where they want to be able to play beautiful accompaniment and chords underneath the vocalists and as a part of the band, but then also when tasked to or musically appropriate, they want to be able to fill in spaces with beautiful melodic, and rhythmic ideas, or perhaps they’re actually tasked to play a piano solo, and they want to play something beautiful, meaningful, memorable, and fun! 

The same is true, of course for guitarists, and for guitarists often times, especially in rock music we’re talking about a solo being an incredibly significant part of the song to the point where when you see a recorded band live, you expect to hear the same solo. I’m sure you can remember for example, most of Slash’s guitar solos on the top Guns N Roses hits, or the guitar solos from The Black album by Metallica. These solos become some of the most memorable parts of these songs!

While it may be conceivable to create some good sounding music in both of those situations without necessarily knowing all your scales, the reality is it would be extremely time consuming and likely involve a lot of wrong notes that don’t sound good first, because you would be exploring those keys and trying to figure out what works over those chords—and you definitely don’t want to be playing those less than choice sounding notes over the chords in a rehearsal or in the recording studio!

If you know your scales, and you understand music theory, it’s as simple as choosing the scale you want to use over the appropriate chord, and that’s something you can learn to do on the fly which is so much fun and so rewarding.

Scales and theory matter. Get the foundation.