A deliberate practice app for guitar players who want to level up

Cool! I guess there needs to be a way for people to share new lessons to practise, it gets complicated with copyright pretty fast.

For real "lessons" you'd probably need to start at chord progressions, go into scales and how the chords relate back to those, then move to these types of soloing technique lessons.

AlphaTab is the star here https://github.com/CoderLine/alphaTab - it's been maintained tirelessly for years by Daniel Kuschny.

I've started to build this type of lessons sitea few times in the past and never really got it together enough to release anything. I've done scale/chord/arpeggio tools: https://github.com/webprofusion/scalex

What do you need "scales" practice for on guitar? It's a totally relative instrument except when playing on empty strings, so there's only one "scale" pattern that you have to learn. It's nothing like a keyboard!

There are dozens of scales to learn, with roots all over the fretboard. Each useful for different things. Just the basic minor pentatonic requires five different patterns. Eight note scales require eight different patterns, with various roots depending on the mode you want to play.

The Guitar Grimoirr scale book is 200 pages!

Yeah, this is about modes, really.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mode_(music)

By "pattern" you mean starting the scale on a different note/step? (or, equivalently, rolling the interval arrangement and ending up with one that's seemingly "different"?) That seems like a trivial change - if you can play C-D-E-F etc. you can play D-E-F etc. Why does it have to be "learned" separately?

No, there are different scales. For a start, you can play a minor scale instead of a major one, or you can play a chromatic one (all the notes, a semitone at a time). Sticking to the notes of a scale when playing a melody is playing in a particular mode, for instance the pentatonic scale is a blues mode. Several modes are from ancient Greece and create strange stiff-sounding moods. I can't claim great consciousness of the mode/scale used in any familiar songs (other than the pentatonic), but this is a thing and it goes on a lot. Popular in the technical end of thrash metal.

Edit: the minor scale doesn't count because C major = A minor if you start on A, fair enough, forget that one.

Allan Holdsworth enters the chat..

> the minor scale doesn't count because C major = A minor if you start on A, fair enough, forget that one.

It might actually count since the harmonic minor exists. But this is just stressing the point that all of those "separate" scales might perhaps be best introduced as simple variations of the usual diatonic scale. Then sure, you might want to practice them a little bit, but at least you should have "learned" them in that you are not wondering what you're supposed to play.

Even though they don't all have seven notes? (Why is a seven-note scale called "diatonic" anyway, that should mean a scale of two notes, doesn't sound very exciting.)

Captrice allows you to export an exercise collection. You get a json file that can be shared with others or copied to another device where it can be imported back into the app.

> AlphaTab is the star here

Absolutely! High quality stuff. I wasn't aware of the person behind the project. Thanks for mentioning it.

They don’t really need to be learned differently. They do need to be practised though.

The patterns are different on different string sets. You don't need to learn DEF with the same pattern again, but you do need to learn all the ways of playing CDE

> Why is a seven-note scale called "diatonic" anyway

The prefix of "diatonic" is "dia" ("through"), not "di" ("two"), but nobody really knows what exactly its origin (διάτονος, "diátonos") was supposed to mean[1]: it's probably either something like "through the tones" or "stretched out tones".

The second meaning is closer to the modern definition we have for diatonic: the 7 (out of 12) notes are selected to be as stretched out as possible in the octave, that is, each adjacent note is either 1 or 2 semitones apart, and the two 1-semitone-apart pairs are as far as possible from each other (note that the second requirement excludes e.g. the ascending melodic minor[2] from being considered diatonic, even though it has 7 notes).

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/diatonic

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_minor_scale

No, a pattern does not refer to changing the key of the scale.

A pattern is a way of playing a scale across the strings without having to move your hand. To play the same scale in the same key at a different position on the neck, the pattern of notes is different.

You have to learn 5 different patterns to be able to play a single pentatonic scale anywhere on the neck.

Obviously they all start at a different position if you want to use a different key - that is easy. Still 5 patterns to learn though just for that one scale.

Wikt doesn't give any other word where dia- means "stretched out". It's usually "across". I guess a stretched-out thing is stretched across a space.

But then the pattern across strings is also "relative" and only depends on the guitar tuning you're playing. For instance in the standard tuning, two neighboring strings are always a perfect fourth apart (five frets) unless they're the G-B strings in which case they're a major third apart (four frets). So if you know where you'd be playing a note on one string, that same note is just five frets back or four frets back on the next one. Which is again a totally "relative" framing that works for any individual note the same way. You can even figure out where you'd have to play if the tuning was non-standard. These patterns only have to be practiced a little bit, there's not really any need to learn them from scratch.

(If anything, I would want a "guitar learning" app to automatically come up with its own exercises, similar to ear training apps for learning to recognize intervals - and using something like a spaced repetition approach to evaluate how the user is doing.)

Diastasis recti for example refers to stomach muscles being stretched (normally during pregnancy).

Scales are definitely important. Building up the reflexes to just play a scale at a given point helps a lot especially when playing with other people.

Sounds like you answered your own question:

> What do you need "scales" practice for on guitar?

> These patterns only have to be practiced a little bit

Scale patterns on a guitar are optimized for A: starting (lowest note 1) on a particular finger on a particular string and B: not sliding your hand up and down too much. For example, I know five major scale patterns: two start on the first string, two on the second, and one on the third.

Which seven notes matters. At least on a guitar you only get 7 or 12. Some pipe organs have 15 notes which allows them to sound much better when you choose the right one (but some keys are horrible despite having 15 notes to choose from where as the standard 12 is an acceptable compromise for anything even if it worse where the 15 work). Violin gives you infinite choices, and I've seen keyboards that have 50+ (look up microtonal music). You can also remove the frets from a guitar - I've heard of one person (exactly one person) doing that.

Blues scales, various jazz scales, scales influenced by ragas or the countless other music traditions from around the world, microtonal scales, nonstandard tunings like fifths/DADGAD/DADF#A, scales with different fingering and picking patterns to increase movement speed in different directions, scales that are adjusted to use or avoid open strings because of the effects on ornamentation/drones/other techniques, scales that include sweeping sections or are entirely composed of sweeping arpeggios, etc.

Nearly every popular-music guitar lesson series in the world teaches the five various pentatonic patterns--the few exceptions being those that focus on classical guitar or non-western music. You might find this article interesting.

https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/43516/can-someone-...

There is definitely theory to how they are constructed, and you are right that the shifts and adjustments can be derived if you think about it and practice it. But that's just a longer way to the five patterns.

Yea you can play the scales at any starting position to change the root note and the scale remains the same fret spacing as if you started with an open string, only now it starts at the fret you chose for the root. See 'fretboard logic' for more info.

This is why learning guitar when I was younger was so difficult to me; people just presented things like "you have to learn these 5 scale patterns" but they didn't really go into why, it was just "memorize this stuff and then you'll be good!", but I hate rote memorization without understanding the underlying principles. I'm old and didn't have the internet back then so I was just learning from various books or friends and it was slow going, but I still see things like this presented in tons of Youtube videos today.

I've since gone back and learned a bit of music theory as an adult and it's been super helpful understanding the underlying principles so I can work things out vs. having to just memorize things without understanding why they work.

I think then you can go practice the various scale patterns and get good at them with the knowledge that you can always work out the scale from first principles if you need to.

Different strokes for different folks though I guess, I'm sure there's an argument to be made for not overwhelming folks with too much theory out of the gate. Not sure if I had started with a bunch of theory if I would have stuck with it when I was younger.

> not overwhelming folks with too much theory out of the gate.

Thing is, it's not even "too much theory". It really is just a simple tone-semitone pattern and a few bare facts about how the usual guitar tuning works, that you'd know anyway if you've ever had to tune your guitar by hand. That's all it takes to make the guitar explainable from first principles. Then sure, you can practice the "patterns" all you want for convenience's sake, but you don't have to commit anything to memory that you could not figure out again from scratch if needed.

The other patterns for the basic scales are just the missing notes too, like black keys being pentatonics and white being a traditional scale.

> This is why learning guitar when I was younger was so difficult to me

I agree. The downvoted op is right in a way. Guitarists have a way to make things difficult. Just learn to play the 1 octave major scale/arpeggio, and triads, then 7th shells. The guitar is relative, a 1 octave scale on a guitar is the same, on keyboard it's positional.

However it's worth mentioning that I think Berklee does teach patterns, and a few jazz guitarists say to learn it too. It almost seems like learning guitar is not as worked out as other instruments. Everybody that gets good winds up having to learn all the things other guitarists have had to figure out over years after they rote learned it.

> Thing is, it's not even "too much theory".

I would agree with you. I feel like watching videos where someone goes "hey, so here's this pattern that completely unlocks the neck for you, don't be stuck in a box anymore!" and all they're showing you is where the various notes in a key are along the neck (now I know that, but I wouldn't have known that before...) and it's WAY more confusing than if you just learn how the pentatonic scale works and how to find the notes in a key etc. And the funny thing is, the only reason I was stuck in that box in the first place is because of silly rote memorization without understanding why you play the various notes in a scale etc., it just feels like this thing that kind of compounds when you just learn patterns vs. just learning the underlying principles.

But again, I'm completely amateur at this stuff still, and I don't have any experience teaching other folks an instrument, so it's hard for me to say with any certainty that we should be teaching it one way or another I guess.