What are your favorite scales to practice daily?

What scales are the best for practicing for Instrumental Surf? I’m guessing traditional blues scales?

Which ones would you recommend for an intermediate player?

There is another approach based upon adding notes to the minor and major pentatonics, which I, personally, find easier for practical application:
https://surfguitar101.com/forums/post/314864/

As far as I know, minor/aeolian, major/ionian, the minor blues scale and the Byzantine scale are the most prominent scales in surf music. The latter one is not as easy to built from pentatonics. I find it easiest to think of it as two major chords with the distance of one halfstep/fret stacked on top of each other (e.g. E major and F major).

However, my general advice would be: Learn the scales, but spend more time learning songs!

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psychonaut wrote:

A Phrygian dominant [ also called Byzantine scale) is quite common in surf - miserlou comes to mind, is really just an inverted harmonic minor (starting on the 5th note instead of on 1).

There is a tiny difference ... Phrygian Dominant has a minor 7th, Byzantine has a major 7th.

Scales are great to learn, but if you focus on the scale shapes, you run the risk of locking yourself in a box. Taking an intervalic approach to learning scales can really help. You can do this as a separate exercise ... learn all the scales ... but also, learn what the building blocks are, and how each note in the scale relates back to the root.

The surf sound (in my humble opinion) comes from scales that have a minor third interval in them somewhere. So a major scale (Ionian), and by extension a pure minor scale (Aeolian) do not have a minor third interval between any consecutive notes. But Phrygian Dominant does, between the minor second and major third. The Byzantine scale is the same as Phrygian Dominant, but it uses a major seventh, so now we get an additional minor third interval between the minor sixth and major seventh. I think this is why these two scales in particular are core to surf rock. And because they are both "major" by nature (having a major third), they work perfectly over a tonic major chord.

this is my first post, I'm new ... I swore I'd just sit back and observe for a while. So I quite possibly just put my size 12 foot in my mouth here. Everyone has their own way of learning, and I found that breaking things down to the intervals really worked for me.

Remember that scales mean nothing out of context. It's like a ying-yang, the scale is only one half. It will never make sense until you view it next to the other half, which in this case is gong to be whatever chord you're playing over. Then you really hear how the scale relates back to the tonal centre.

A great exercise to hear this is to play over a drone. you can pull these up on Youtube. Then play each scale or mode in the same key as the drone. Bonus points if you play your scale on a single string, where you can really see the intervals. Because the drone is neither major / minor / diminished / dominant, you can try any scale over, and it really highlights the "sound" or "feel" of a scale. Here's a drone in E ... try playing each note in Miserlou over it. https://youtu.be/3yrsWiMWCkY

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Last edited: Apr 01, 2024 09:03:02

psychonaut wrote:

synchro wrote:

HeroSandwich wrote:

psychonaut wrote:

A Phrygian dominant [ also called Byzantine scale) is quite common in surf - miserlou comes to mind, is really just an inverted harmonic minor (starting on the 5th note instead of on 1).

There is a tiny difference ... Phrygian Dominant has a minor 7th, Byzantine has a major 7th.

Scales are great to learn, but if you focus on the scale shapes, you run the risk of locking yourself in a box. Taking an intervalic approach to learning scales can really help. You can do this as a separate exercise ... learn all the scales ... but also, learn what the building blocks are, and how each note in the scale relates back to the root.

The surf sound (in my humble opinion) comes from scales that have a minor third interval in them somewhere. So a major scale (Ionian), and by extension a pure minor scale (Aeolian) do not have a minor third interval between any consecutive notes. But Phrygian Dominant does, between the minor second and major third. The Byzantine scale is the same as Phrygian Dominant, but it uses a major seventh, so now we get an additional minor third interval between the minor sixth and major seventh. I think this is why these two scales in particular are core to surf rock. And because they are both "major" by nature (having a major third), they work perfectly over a tonic major chord.

this is my first post, I'm new ... I swore I'd just sit back and observe for a while. So I quite possibly just put my size 12 foot in my mouth here. Everyone has their own way of learning, and I found that breaking things down to the intervals really worked for me.

Remember that scales mean nothing out of context. It's like a ying-yang, the scale is only one half. It will never make sense until you view it next to the other half, which in this case is gong to be whatever chord you're playing over. Then you really hear how the scale relates back to the tonal centre.

A great exercise to hear this is to play over a drone. you can pull these up on Youtube. Then play each scale or mode in the same key as the drone. Bonus points if you play your scale on a single string, where you can really see the intervals. Because the drone is neither major / minor / diminished / dominant, you can try any scale over, and it really highlights the "sound" or "feel" of a scale. Here's a drone in E ... try playing each note in Miserlou over it. https://youtu.be/3yrsWiMWCkY

I’ve always been amazed by how much mileage one can get out of harmonic minors. I hear a lot of these in Surf, whether as Phrygian Dominants, or simply I, IV, Vs in a minor key.

While scales can box you in, there are ways around that. I use three basic forms of two-octave scales, which would superimpose over a C Maj in the first position, an A Maj in the first position and an E Maj in the first position. Years ago, I practiced these to perfection, in all 12 keys, plays their relative harmonic minors. I think of these as a way to orient, to the neck.

Beyond that, are the other scale forms which can fit in between, pentatonics (which are a great way to move around) and linear arpeggios, which are an even greater way to traverse distances on the fretboard. But even with all of that, you still need to develop flexibility. For me, that was the time consuming thing.

One thing that really helped me was learning triad inversions, both linearly, and across the neck. That was the adhesive that knit it all together, for me. If I’m thinking about anything, while playing, I’m most likely thinking about triads. Playing lines out of triad forms keeps me oriented, yet flexible. At this point, I’ve been using this approach for a long time, so often, I don’t put it into conscious thought.

If I copy a solo, I usually find that many of the notes come out of triads, either which follow the changes directly, or would express standard chord substitution methods.

I've often been frustrated by the way music is taught. People tend to overcomplicate and over analyze. It causes a lot of confusion. If you look at most scale books, they contain a gazillion scales. No one lives long enough to learn all that. Most of them are simply inversions or alterations anyway.
I had a big epiphany one day while struggling to play over a II V I progression. Most books will tell you to use a Dorian scale over the minor 7, a mixolydian scale over the V7, and an Ionian scale over the I. So I'd sit there trying to figure out a Dorian scale thinking OK if I play a major scale and flatten the the 3rd and the 7th... well by that time the min7 chord would have passed by and I'd be lost. One day I realized it's all the major scale and in a real life playing situation all that modes stuff was just theoretical BS. Nobody plays lines that way always starting on the scale root. All the major scale notes work for each chord in the 2 5 1, and it's the chord you're playing over that dictates the mode anyway, so why even waste time thinking about it?
Although I do use scales, I think of them as a way to connect chord tones, unless im doing rock type riffing. Normally I'll play off of triads and build my lines using half step approaches, chromatics and enclosures. You can get some pretty complex and nicely contoured lines like that with scarcely any theory. In reality you only need to know if what you're playing over is a major, a minor, or a dominant 7th. As long as you know your major/minor scale and triads in all 12 keys, 90% of the rest of it is just window dressing.

I certainly agree that the way music is taught over complicates matters. My approach is to think in terms of tone centers, which means that the II, V, I is all based one on tone center. If you asked me to play an improvised line over Dm7 to G7 to C, without any other context, I’d select notes from an F triad, a G triad and a C triad. Of course, with no context, there isn’t much to work with, and that would sound predictable and bland, but it would fit over the motion of the changes. If you kept on going, repeating these changes and had time to develop some ideas, you could do a lot more, including playing notes that would fit over chord substitutions for the II, V, I, etc. However, if I’m going to solo over an actual song, knowing the melody, perhaps the lyrics, where the song goes after the II, V, I, and where it was coming from, then there’s a lot more to work with.

The thing is, songs are more than just collections of chord changes, or melodies and rhythms. IMO, there’s a huge difference between playing a song, and playing notes. Scales, triads, etc. are tools for measuring and organizing pitches, but just playing scales does not create music. A song has identity. Every song I’ve ever written reached a point where it took on an identity, and became complete. Some of those songs were complex, others quite simple, but in every case the song reached a point where I knew it as an entity of sorts, and this is durable. If I’m going to play a song I wrote, and especially if I’m going to improvise over it, I have to think about the song, and not just the bits and pieces that make up the song.

Scales are useful, but while they serve as an orientation tool, they are not music. No one buys tickets to hear an artist practice scales.

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