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Introduction

This book contains reference materials for the Fret Science: Complete Scale Fluency course. It is not intended to stand alone without the multiple hours of video lessons that comprise the course.

The course videos are designed to be viewed in order. For each video, this document contains a brief summary along with any key diagrams and descriptions of any exercises.

You can use this document as a reference after watching a video (or after completing the course) to refresh your memory on the relevant concepts.

Memorize this: There isn’t much memorization involved in this course. Anything that must be memorized is explicitly called out in a block like this.

1-1 Why This Course Exists▶ Watch the video

The secret to learning and using scales to make actual music is to understand them from multiple angles and to practice them musically. This course brings together multiple mental models into a coherent framework that is easy to understand and use. It combines several widely taught guitar concepts—including CAGED, 3NPS, and position-playing—into a unified system, and it explains how to make music with each of them.

By the end of the course, you will be able to play more than a dozen scales freely across the entire fretboard, and, more importantly, you’ll be able to make them sound like music.

1-2 What Does It Mean to Truly Learn a Scale?▶ Watch the video

There are four stages of understanding a scale:

  1. Conceptual knowledge: understanding the scale’s formula and intervals
  2. Head knowledge: knowing how to find the notes of the scale on the fretboard
  3. Hand knowledge: developing muscle memory for your fingers
  4. Musical knowledge: being able to make music with the scale by connecting ideas and playing with good phrasing

To develop all four types of understanding, we will look at each scale through four lenses:

  1. Intervallic lens: understanding how the scale is built internally, and how the notes relate to the harmony around them
  2. Linear lens: how the scale behaves on a single string or pair of strings
  3. In-position lens: playing across multiple strings while staying within a narrow range of frets (typically one fret per finger)
  4. Diagonal lens: shifting easily between neighboring playing positions

1-3 How to Practice Effectively▶ Watch the video

There are six keys to making the most out of your practice time:

  1. Treat exercises as templates: Every exercise contains multiple variables that can be changed. For example, you can change the key, the string set, the articulation, the rhythm, the melodic contour, the tempo, and more. These possibilities multiply together, and it is much more effective to practice several different variations of an exercise than it is to play the same exercise over and over.
  2. Make a plan for what you want to improve: When you sit down to practice, have a plan for what you intend to work on, focusing on your weaknesses as much as possible.
  3. Use variation and interleaving to stay out of autopilot: One key to fast progress is to focus your complete attention on your playing while you practice. Changing exercises frequently helps a lot. As you improve on each exercise, practice it less frequently, but keep it in rotation with newer exercises.
  4. Take breaks and protect your sleep: Your brain needs time away from the guitar to process what you have practiced. Sleep and short breaks amplify your practice results.
  5. Get objective feedback—record yourself or work with a coach: You can’t accurately hear what you’re playing while playing, so you will need an objective third party to help identify your mistakes and weaknesses. Record yourself with your phone, or work with a teacher who can guide you.
  6. Work deliberately on your weaknesses: Deliberate practice means: identifying a problem, hypothesizing the cause, trying a solution, testing whether it works, locking in what works, and then moving on to the next issue. It isn’t always fun, it requires total concentration, and it’s the fastest way to improve.

1-4 Some Basic Terminology▶ Watch the video

Some basic definitions of music theory terms that will be helpful throughout the course:

  • Pitch: How high or low a note sounds.
  • Octave: Two pitches separated by 12 semitones (or frets), both sounding similar in a deep way. An octave can also refer to a span of pitches ranging up to 12 semitones.
  • Pitch class: Notes that sound similar in a deep way belong to the same pitch class. We give them letter names, like A, B♭, or C#. There are twelve pitch classes in Western music.
  • Chromatic scale: A scale that includes all twelve pitch classes.
  • Interval: The distance between two notes, using one note as a reference and counting the number of semitones to reach the other note.
  • Semitone: An interval that is equivalent to a one-fret distance on guitar. This is the smallest possible interval in Western music theory.
  • Scale: A collection of pitch classes. Most common scales have five or seven notes. The intervals between the notes of a scale are what give each scale its characteristic sound.
  • Tonal center: The “home base” note in a musical context, which usually corresponds to the key of the piece.
  • Chord: Two or more pitch classes played together.
  • Arpeggio: A chord played one note at a time over one or more octaves.
  • Root: The reference pitch of a chord or scale. Chords and scales include the root pitch in their name (e.g., C# is the root of a C# major chord). Root is similar to tonal center, but tonal center is a more global property of a musical passage, whereas root is a more local property of individual chords or scales inside a passage.

1-5 Why Ear Training Matters (And Two Tools to Start Using)▶ Watch the video

A big part of developing musicianship is developing your ear—a skill called ear training. One of the most helpful skills to develop is the ability to recognize the interval of a note relative to the tonal center. There are two tools I recommend to help you develop this ability:

  1. Sonofield Ear Trainer: This app trains you to recognize intervals relative to a tonal center by posing musical “questions” that you answer by tapping on the appropriate interval name. The app has a gradual learning curve, and a lot of functionality is available for free. I recommend practicing with the app for 5-10 minutes each day, away from your guitar. If you want to unlock all of the functionality, you can get a 20% discount on the “Pro” upgrade by visiting: https://sonofield.com/fretscience (affiliate link).
  2. A “Freeze” pedal: An infinite sustain (or “Freeze”) pedal captures a snapshot of whatever note or chord you are currently playing on guitar, and it plays a sustained version of that sound indefinitely. When practicing the exercises in this course, I recommend using one of these pedals to create a drone of the root note of the scale you are practicing. Playing with a drone reinforces the sound of each interval in the scale, helping your ears learn to recognize them. I own and can recommend these two pedals (links are to Sweetwater.com):

As an alternative to a "freeze" pedal, I created a Drone Generator that you can use for all of the exercises in this course. It has a metronome function, and many exercises in this course provide preset drone/metronome settings you can access with a single click.

Be patient. Developing this skill will take time.