An Introduction To Scales

All right, getting into harmony and theory, and, um, basically all the harmony stuff is going to start with scales, okay. Now, most people think of scales as being something like this, right? So that's what everybody thinks about when we're going to work on scales. But I've never heard anybody get on stage and do that, no, you know, ever. So learning scales like that doesn't, you know, is outside of a hand exercise, and listening to what the scale sounds like in its basic form, there's not a lot of reason to spend a bunch of time there, you know, because that's not how you're going to use it. Basically, the way it works in chord scale theory is that you're going to have a chord that's being played. The notes you're going to use to outline that chord sound are going to come from the scale that go with that chord. Chords and scales are going to match up, as you probably already know, right? So that your note choices for any chord sound are simply going to be dictated by the scale that goes with that chord. So it stands to reason you need to know where all the notes of a scale are on the bass fingerboard, as opposed to just a couple of ways of going up and down, you know, which really doesn't do you much good. So if I had, like, this, doesn't sound like I'm playing a scale, does it? No. I'm just using the notes of that major scale going with that chord, but I know where they all are on the fingerboard, to the point where I'm not thinking about what I played just now any more than you'd think about each word as you would say it, you know, when you talk to somebody, right? But if I stopped you mid-sentence on a word and said, well, how do you spell that word, you'd be able to tell me, right? Just like if I'm playing, okay, well, I stopped on the five of the A major scale, I can tell you what it is when I think about it, but that's the last thing that was going through my head, you know, when I was actually playing it, right? All right, so what is music? Well, music is a language. It's communication based on emotion. The player feels, plays. The listener hears, feels. That's it. It's just like what you already know how to do, with the two main differences being that there's no intellect involved in the communication process, and that the bass is taking the place of your vocal cords and producing the sounds for the language. So when you think about music, you just want to think about it in the same way that you do with the spoken language, because it really conceptually is exactly the same thing, and a much simpler form, actually, right? So the notes are the alphabet and/or vocabulary for the language. Notes are broken up into scales for the same reason that letters are broken up into, or, well, that letters are used in words, words in sentences, sentences and paragraphs. It's a way to organize the material to use it to communicate. So you want to look at scales as an organizational process for your notes, and eventually the scales will go away. In other words, you're not going to need them in the way you're actually first going to study them, because it's just assimilating vocabulary, right? Right. So, I mean, the short version is just basically think about all the things that you do musically as you do with the spoken language. So, from a fingering standpoint, now this is the last of the seven, now I'm starting over. I just played every note of the A major scale possible on the four string version of this bass, right? So the first thing to do is just kind of get the geography organized on your neck. Now, is this...