Seeing Scales Outside of the Box

In my opinion the most important thing is to be able to SING a scale you wnt to play. Like: how does the major scale sound? how does the minor/harmonic/melodic scale sound? and so on. If a player can do that he won’t have any problems learning scales and finding them on fretboard without watching some diagrams or scale boxes.

I started learning scales the moment i picked up electric guitar because i was heavily inspired by Michael Angelo Batio and Steve Vai. 5 years passed from than and now i don’t even think in boxes or in scales. I just know what i want to play. I can hear exactly what i want to play in my head before even playing it. I often think of new licks and exercises while sitting in a bus or in university. And the moment i hear it i know how to play it on guitar because with years of practice your fingers simply know where the certain note is and which patterns will be in there.

Right now i am at the stage of using the whole fretboard for building one single lick so i use all scale boxes, using them both vertical, horizontal, diagonal, diagonal/backwards and so on. I never felt like being stuck in a box. Movement between boxes also depends on what i play. if it’s a shred solo – sure i will use boxes to build fast runs. if it’s some middle speed solo like Vai or Satch i sure have totally different approach to it.

With time you just feel whether you need to fret only 1 fret, or 2 more frets or the string below to get certain note and in the beginning it may sound confusing and difficult but it’s not.

I took a somewhat different approach. When beginnign to go into fusion playing, I found myself gradually
stepping back from all scales and boxes. I began to practice by playing over static grooves (often just a bass line), and singing everything I played. Not only did it develop my ear alot, it also helped me accustom my ear to playing outside lines with confidence and conviction. That thing alone, confidence and conviction are crucial to be able to play out and make it sound natural. The second key is timing and rhytmical provess. With good time and groovy note value alteration, you can play pretty much everything and get away with it 😉 One example of what I used to do is in this video; I just recorded 4 note chords by ear (not caring about keys or anything), over a static groove in A. Then I just improvise by ear, and trust my ears and my timing to keep me floating. I don’t really analyze chords when I play anymore (doing that would mean alot of focus on that instead of groving), but let my ears guide me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnuOgc6Njzs

In this way I don’t really view chords as chords anymore. When I hear a D dim chord for instance, or a F#maj#11, I don’t really approach them as chords with chordal notes, but rather I hear scales. Over the first chord, I might hear it as a “Altered scale chord” and the second as a “Lydian” or “Lydian dominant chord”. This frees me from the traditional sound of playign over chord notes, but lets me focus on finding notes that sometimes clash with the chords or scales and elaborate on that tension when playing.

Not sure this makes much sense, but it is I have realized over the years, quite similar to how Holdsworth views his playing. I will cover this type of thing in a future lesson though.

@Mike Edwin 138 wrote:

When hearing the word ‘Box’ and phrases like ‘breaking out of the box’ I can only assume this is reffering to Pentatonic scale shapes. Since they most resemble a box.

I think he’s talking about how almost all scales can be reduced to a 4 fret box that you play across the strings keeping the hand in one position, not moving up the neck at all.

I have a hard time playing a blues scale in a box, as I first learned it like this: (seems like forever ago now)

Hope this works, I hate posting tabs on forums

Because I first learned that scale in a moving pattern, and my pentatonic in a box pattern I was already trying to get “out of the box” in all the scales I learned and tried to learn multiple fingerings to all scales.

Nowdays I still tend to “think” in boxes but NEVER have a hard time going up or down the fret board. I’ve learned to link all the patterns I know and it took me about 6 months to a year or so to get there in my head. For a long time I just learned my patterns and just left it at that, then once I really started trying to connect them all it didn’t seem that hard, but by that point I’d already memorized most of the common patterns and had quite an arsinal of licks and tricks so it’s not like I was “beginner” anymore.

My current “goal” that I work on is memorizing all of the triad patterns not just in physical form, but knowing what they are so that at any given moment I can figure out what on earth chord I’m playing. I tend to do lots of awesome lead chord stuff overtop rhythm players but rarely have a clue of what I’m doing. Sometimes I’ll be playing a 7th chord behind the 4th chord, so I’m playing the minor 3rd of the key… but I don’t think about that while I’m playing it. I have to sit there, stare at the fretboard, stare off into space… “oOo… THAT’S what I did…”

I can now easily reconize my 1/3/5 triads, but the others are harder to spot on the fly.