Continuous scale & arpeggio exercises

[James W]

Thought I'd tap into JGO Forum Hive Mind...

How many people here use continuous scale and arpeggio exercises to learn a tune? What benefits do these sort of exercises have? Do people actually derive vocabulary from them?

Personally, I have found these sorts of exercises to be good ear training - connecting one's ears to the fretboard etc. as well as good for technique. It remains to be seen whether they can be used to develop vocab yet, but I think I'm going set about playing all the arps as 3-5-7-9, just for starters, the possibilities are of course considerable.

This is pretty bread 'n' butter stuff, quite fundamental I'd say, but I thought I'd start a thread on it anyway...

[Tal_175]

Playing continuous scales and arpeggios over the changes of a tune is part of my practice routine. It took a long time to internalize the fretboard to the extend where I could do that. I remember my disappointment when I realized that being able to play continuous scales and arpeggios up and down the fretboard didn't transform my solos to the next level. But it did make a huge difference in how I learn vocabulary.

The difficulty in learning vocabulary was that it was very time consuming to get to a point where I could apply new vocabulary in different positions, for different chords and freely vary them. But all the fretboard work that I had to do to play continuous exercises actually became very useful for quickly figuring out chord specific language in different areas and see other chord tones, scale tones and related arpeggios around them (which is useful for making spontaneous variations).

[fep]

I have done that in the past. Really helped me. And yes, it did result in additional vocabulary.

The book "Super Chops" was all about continuous, no rests, playing.

[emanresu]

Its something basic and good for warming up. But no. It adds exactly 1 word to the vocabulary... sorry. 2 words: run up and run down.

[James W]

Its something basic and good for warming up. But no. It adds exactly 1 word to the vocabulary... sorry. 2 words: run up and run down.

Perhaps there is only up & down initially, but as I intimate in the OP, this concept can be used with things like extracting arpeggios from scales etc. basically it can be used as the first step to creating sequences - Mark Levine in the Jazz Theory book gives a bunch of suggestions which he applies to the first few chords of Stella. I also encountered the continuous arpeggio idea in one of Pete Callard's articles in Guitar Techniques magazine at least 15 years ago. So the initial albeit necessary first steps are pretty dry and unexciting I agree, but used creatively it can be a powerful tool. It does however require training one's mind as much as one's fingers...

[emanresu]

Must emphasize: instead "basic" should have used "essential".

[AllanAllen]

I think it's a great exercise. All the boring work like scales, arpeggios, chord inversions makes a great player, Then learning tunes in multiple keys is where you can put it all together.

[grahambop]

The Barry Harris stuff is all about using scales and arps to outline a tune, and then using various devices (half steps, enclosures, pivots etc.) to generate vocabulary from them.

I haven’t used it that much myself (simply because I’d already been building up vocab/ideas etc. for years before I even came across it), but I do use the scale outline stuff sometimes just to get my bearings on an unfamiliar tune.

[pauln]

Thought I'd tap into JGO Forum Hive Mind...

How many people here use continuous scale and arpeggio exercises to learn a tune? What benefits do these sort of exercises have? Do people actually derive vocabulary from them?

Personally, I have found these sorts of exercises to be good ear training - connecting one's ears to the fretboard etc. as well as good for technique. It remains to be seen whether they can be used to develop vocab yet, but I think I'm going set about playing all the arps as 3-5-7-9, just for starters, the possibilities are of course considerable.

This is pretty bread 'n' butter stuff, quite fundamental I'd say, but I thought I'd start a thread on it anyway...

I think learning a tune comes in stages within which slightly different approaches may be more effective within the different stages.

I think running continuous scales and arps of various schema is more useful after the basic song form and basic harmonic progression is well grasped. Continuous scales and arp schema are good for the mechanics of the hands, but may not produce useful vocabulary until the song's harmonic structure is grasped by the mind's ear, after which the hands may learn and integrate rather than just mechanically exercise. Once the foundation of the song is clear, then interpolation, extrapolation, and general exploration may be more likely to result in specific vocabulary for the tune and general vocabulary for other tunes and parts of other tunes, which is not to say that this doesn't come almost immediately for some musicians for some songs. (see below about during performance)

Even then, if the goals include acquisition of vocabulary through playing (experimenting, evaluating, selecting), it seems there needs to be a periodic pause to collect any candidate vocabulary for further examination. In practice working with a new song, I stop as soon as I have discovered something, may jump to another tune with a similar harmonic movement and test the thing there, take notice of possibilities for inserting or omitting some steps in the movement, go back to the first tune with a set of new experiments, etc. So basically in practice during the earlier stages of learning a tune I stop all the time to check things; only after a tune is already known would I ever play through it continuously... it is too easy to hear and recognize lines and phrases of interest and then lose them by not stopping to listen to them in various contexts. At the point where I'm playing more continuously I am less in the exploration phase and more in the fine tuning, polishing, integration stage (working on existing vocabulary rather than searching for new vocabulary).

I think all guitarists have experienced the dismay of uncovering something new and wonderful in the course of practicing, only to realize a few moments later that it's gone, slipped from the mind, and lost until accidentally discovered again. So I always hit the brakes at the moment I find something and harden my memory by applying it to other tunes, making modifications, experiments, etc. to fix it in my vocabulary by forming connections to various harmonic contexts.

Now the other side of the coin is when I discover something new in performance, which actually makes up a good portion of the things I learn. Somehow, my musical mentality on stage is stronger, including memory. I find it is typical to easily recall later the musical ideas I played which in their moment of execution had no previous expression but for which I felt a complete confidence in their coming result (like undiscovered potential vocabulary, "You were only waiting for this moment to arise."); the recollection of those moments and their contents feel "aurally photographic".

[PMB]

I consider continuous arpeggios as a primer for developing vocabulary, a useful way of outlining basic harmonic fields so that the real work can begin. As pauln suggests, I'd usually apply this method after already internalising a tune aurally although it certainly helps in that regard as well.

Some tunes are more amenable than others to this approach. For instance, I applied this process many years ago to the basic changes of All The Things You Are and it was an ideal candidate - each section is defined harmonically by relatively slow moving cycles of related 7th chords. From memory, the tunes that Pete Callard selected in his Guitar Techniques articles possessed similar qualities (for instance, Blue Bossa).

Anyway, here's my ATTYA exercise. Note that I took some liberty in omitting certain notes at either end of the register for musical reasons:

[James W]

I think learning a tune comes in stages within which slightly different approaches may be more effective within the different stages.

I think running continuous scales and arps of various schema is more useful after the basic song form and basic harmonic progression is well grasped. Continuous scales and arp schema are good for the mechanics of the hands, but may not produce useful vocabulary until the song's harmonic structure is grasped by the mind's ear, after which the hands may learn and integrate rather than just mechanically exercise. Once the foundation of the song is clear, then interpolation, extrapolation, and general exploration may be more likely to result in specific vocabulary for the tune and general vocabulary for other tunes and parts of other tunes, which is not to say that this doesn't come almost immediately for some musicians for some songs. (see below about during performance)

Even then, if the goals include acquisition of vocabulary through playing (experimenting, evaluating, selecting), it seems there needs to be a periodic pause to collect any candidate vocabulary for further examination. In practice working with a new song, I stop as soon as I have discovered something, may jump to another tune with a similar harmonic movement and test the thing there, take notice of possibilities for inserting or omitting some steps in the movement, go back to the first tune with a set of new experiments, etc. So basically in practice during the earlier stages of learning a tune I stop all the time to check things; only after a tune is already known would I ever play through it continuously... it is too easy to hear and recognize lines and phrases of interest and then lose them by not stopping to listen to them in various contexts. At the point where I'm playing more continuously I am less in the exploration phase and more in the fine tuning, polishing, integration stage (working on existing vocabulary rather than searching for new vocabulary).

I think all guitarists have experienced the dismay of uncovering something new and wonderful in the course of practicing, only to realize a few moments later that it's gone, slipped from the mind, and lost until accidentally discovered again. So I always hit the brakes at the moment I find something and harden my memory by applying it to other tunes, making modifications, experiments, etc. to fix it in my vocabulary by forming connections to various harmonic contexts.

Now the other side of the coin is when I discover something new in performance, which actually makes up a good portion of the things I learn. Somehow, my musical mentality on stage is stronger, including memory. I find it is typical to easily recall later the musical ideas I played which in their moment of execution had no previous expression but for which I felt a complete confidence in their coming result (like undiscovered potential vocabulary, "You were only waiting for this moment to arise."); the recollection of those moments and their contents feel "aurally photographic".

Thanks for this post. What you say about discovering something new while playing rings true - it's for this reason that I will almost always record myself improvising (usually over a backing track) because I might stumble upon a good idea even when most of what I play is unsatisfactory.