Hour 61 - 65
I’m starting to chip away at the plethora of material that Sco recommended to practice (see hour 58 - 59). I’m taking one small concept at a time; specifically, I starting with the major scale and played it ascending and descending, 2 notes per string, starting on every note in the scale, in eighths, triplets and sixteenths with the metronome set to 80 beats per minute. I repeated the exercise in all keys - I like to run through the cycle of 5ths to mix things up: C, F, Bb, Eb, Ab, Db, Gb, B, E, A, D and then G. It takes me about 40 minutes to run through a single mode this way. Eventually, I’ll work through all 24 modes including the 7 modes of the major, melodic minor and harmonic minor scales as well as whole tone, diminished half whole and diminished whole half. I’ve never been a fan of memorizing patterns - instead, I like to understand the function and sound of each note by identifying it’s interval name. When I first run a mode from a starting note, I consciously and slowly think of each interval as it’s played. From there, speeding it up is pretty easy - it’s just repetition. Some of the benefits of practicing this exercise are: developing a better understanding of the fingerboard, increasing speed and improving one’s ear in identifying so many colorful sounds. Ultimately, all of this info should be second nature. Learning it in such detail leads to being able to execute anything musically imaginable on the instrument without even thinking.