Originally published August 16, 2014, lightly edited for clarity.
I look at music as a language and the notes as its alphabet and/or vocabulary. Scales are a way to organize this information so musicians can easily catalog and index the notes for their harmonic choices. In chord scale theory it’s a match game meaning that the notes that you choose to play are going to come from the scale that go with the chord that you are playing over. With that way of thinking about it, it soon becomes obvious that you need to know where all of the notes of a given scale are on the fingerboard and not just a couple scale pattern shapes. The following video covers how to think about scales as you practice them. Scale practice is one of the fundamentals I teach. For one-on-one help applying these ideas, online bass lessons via Zoom are available.
