Scales/Arpeggios Practice System

[kris]

Originally Posted by gersdal

Cool. For some modes he uses scale sequences, others arpeggios, and others again an intervalic approach. Wonder if that is randomly chosen, or if there is something more to it?

These examples are from spontanic Scof's improvisation.
Good examles of his musical thinking.

[Franklin52]

Originally Posted by kris

These examples are from spontanic Scof's improvisation.
Good examles of his musical thinking.

Great kris, thanks for posting the transcriptions.

[Diederikeggenkamp]

Okay, this thread got bigger than I expected. Nice. I practice modes the same way one would do a warming up before playing a game of football. Albeit a bit of a thorough warming up. I see it as maintenance practice. I hear a lot if this "yeah but you gotta play music man, you can't just run scales blabla". That's so true, but kinda obvious. My problem with it is that a lot of people who speak that way are often the same people that don't want to practice them at all. My teacher at the conservatory calls practicing scales/modes/voicings etc: "creating headroom". In my opinion you can't have enough headroom so I wouldn't really stop practicing them and after all. What's 1 or 2 hours in a day? Not that much. In reply to some other questions I saw. I would say that you have to get all over the instrument: Practice lines/intervals/arpeggios/sequences/voicings/position playing etc etc. technique pretty much comes with the package if you are consistent.

[Unburst]

Originally Posted by Kman

Practice scales and arpeggios but with songs. Hear and play them in the context of chord progressions. That is the best way IMO.

This.

Taking scales and arpeggios out of the context of making music is counter productive, imo.

[Unburst]

Just to elaborate, music education and guitar players especially like to seperate the mechanical aspects of playing their instrument from the musical and then concentrate solely on the mechanical.

IMO, it's a dangerous and bad habit to get into when you are just engaging your left brain in memorizing positions in an abstract and logical way, music doesn't work like that.

A better way of practicing is to use a tune as a guideline and work on the arpeggio and scale shapes using the chords as a template and don't just run the shapes bottom to top and repeat.

Make musical exercises out of it, practice flowing from one chord to another within one "shape", work on improvisational concepts, practice fitting repeating motifs over chord changes, this kind of practice will pay off in your playing much more than mindlessly running scales and arpeggios for hours.

You have to engage both sides of your brain when you're practicing.

[fep]

I did an example of a way to practice arpeggios in this months Practical Study Group - Autumn Leaves thread which is here:

http://www.jazzguitar.be/forum/jazzg...mn-leaves.html

Seems like a can get some more mileage out of it as it seems relevant to this discussion. What do you think?

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