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    Scales: For Beginners - Bundle - The Only 3 Books You Need to Learn Music Scales for Guitar, Scales for Piano and Scale Theory Today
    Scales: For Beginners - Bundle - The Only 3 Books You Need to Learn Music Scales for Guitar, Scales for Piano and Scale Theory Today
    Scales: For Beginners - Bundle - The Only 3 Books You Need to Learn Music Scales for Guitar, Scales for Piano and Scale Theory Today
    Ebook184 pages1 hourMusic

    Scales: For Beginners - Bundle - The Only 3 Books You Need to Learn Music Scales for Guitar, Scales for Piano and Scale Theory Today

    By Preston Hoffman

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    About this ebook

    3 Manuscripts in 1 Book, Including: How to Play Scales, Music Theory and How to Read Music!




    Book 1)


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPreston Hoffman
    Release dateJul 2, 2024
    ISBN9798330265732
    Scales: For Beginners - Bundle - The Only 3 Books You Need to Learn Music Scales for Guitar, Scales for Piano and Scale Theory Today

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      Book preview

      Scales - Preston Hoffman

      SCALES: FOR BEGINNERS

      3 Manuscripts in 1 Book, Including: How to Play Scales, Music Theory and How to Read Music

      Preston Hoffman

      More by Preston Hoffman

      Discover all books from the Music Best Seller Series by Preston Hoffman at:

      bit.ly/preston-hoffman

      Book 1: Music Theory

      Book 2: How to Read Music

      Book 3: How to Play Guitar

      Book 4: How to Play Ukulele

      Book 5: How to Play Piano

      Book 6: How to Play Chords

      Book 7: How to Play Scales

      Themed book bundles available at discounted prices:

      bit.ly/preston-hoffman

      

      how to play scales - cover.jpg

      BOOK 1

      HOW TO PLAY SCALES: IN 1 DAY

      The Only 7 Exercises You Need to Learn Guitar Scales, Piano Scales and Ukulele Scales Today

      Preston Hoffman

      © Copyright 2018 - All rights reserved.

      It is not legal to reproduce, duplicate, or transmit any part of this document by either electronic means or in printed format. Recording of this publication is strictly prohibited.

      Introduction

      Congratulations on purchasing How to Play Scales and thank you for doing so.

      The following chapters will discuss how to play scales on piano and stringed instruments. It will explain the utility of scales as well as the underlying theory. More than that, it will teach you all of the scales that you need to know to be an improvisational master or to have a firm handle on your next composition.

      If you’re wanting to become an incredible musician, then this book is the place to start. If you practice the techniques in this book, then you can start from square one and make massive progress in as little as one day. The knowledge in this book is invaluable - I’ve attained all of it over years and years of musicianship. Now, I get to impart all of that wisdom that I’ve gained to you. My goal is to do so as efficiently as I possibly can while not compromising the educational worthiness of the book.

      No matter whether you want to play piano, guitar, or learn the theory behind major scales so that you can apply them to any given instrument out there, this is the book for you. So read on to become a much better musician in absolutely no time flat.

      There are plenty of books on this subject on the market, thanks again for choosing this one! Every effort was made to ensure it is full of as much useful information as possible, please enjoy!

      Chapter 1: Exercise 1 - Understand the Theory

      As somebody who wants to start learning the art of playing scales and improvising and having a greater musical knowledge in general, it’s very possible that you have a misconception about how things exactly work in these contexts. Indeed, it’s really easy for people who aren’t as familiar with the fluidity of improvisation and musicality to really not have so much of a grasp on the reality of these things.

      People who aren’t as accustomed to music beyond simple chords or potentially even what they’ve heard on the radio tend to think that improvisation and mastering scales is very difficult. This isn’t quite the case. It’s a combination of two things: feel and practice. Feel is the big part. Over time, as you work more and more with your scales and learning your influences, you’re going to gain a greater and greater appreciation for how things should sound.

      This chapter isn’t about the feel, though; this chapter is about the structure. The key to playing scales is to understanding the underlying musicality. The purpose of this chapter is to teach you several different things about music theory. There’s a very good reason for this chapter: I’m a long-time music teacher, specializing in guitar. In my years teaching the guitar, I’ve had many people who come to me knowing a basic amount of the instrument, but when push comes to shove, they have little to no understanding of what everything they’re doing actually amounts to. They can play chords, but they don’t really know how chords work or why they’re named like they are. If I ask them to tell me the practical difference between the A major and A minor chords, for example, they may go as far as to tell me that the chords are related but different, or they may just relate the two chords as happy and sad, but sometimes they’ll have no clue that the two chords are even related at all.

      Would this stems from is a fundamental misunderstanding of music in general. There is nothing spontaneous in music. The spontaneity - and therefore the art - of music comes from the person creating it, but music itself is actually quite structured.

      All of music can be broken down into sequences of notes. Notes are just a way of breaking sound down into chunks. To have a better understanding of what exactly I mean here, think of a siren going from a high note to a low note and back - although it may cycle through many different tones on the way up and down, it’s actually just going through a sonic spectrum and manipulating soundwaves to produce different tones. Giving notes names is just a way of solidifying, identifying, partitioning, and breaking these sonic identities down into smaller chunks.

      In the Western musical tradition, music is broken down into 8 distinct chunks which repeat themselves over and over: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Once you reach G, the cycle starts over again with A. This space between these two 8 notes is referred to as an octave.

      If you were to look at a piano, you would see that there are black keys and white keys. These notes represent the white keys. If you look at a full 88 key piano, the lowest note on it is an A. However, music is usually broken up with the C chromatic scale. I’ll explain what this means in a second.

      In the Western musical tradition, there is often a midpoint between two notes. These midpoints exist between the notes C and D, D and E, F and G, and A and B. If you will the midpoint above a note, you are playing the note’s sharp variant. If you will the midpoint below a note, you are playing the note’s flat variant. Flat means that a note is lower in tone than normal; sharp means that the note is higher in tone than normal. Flats are represented in music with a b, where sharps are represented in music with a #.

      E and F, as well as B and C, do not have these steps between them. This is because the difference between these two notes is the same as the difference between A and A# or between F and F#. The difference between the two is really just a historical codification more than any meaningful musical differentiation.

      The best explanation for the reason that things are this way is that most instruments in an orchestra will tune to the note C and for much of musical history, a large amount of music was written in C. The white keys on the piano represent the natural C major scale. So, in a manner of speaking, this all cropped up out of simple ease of writing and use. 

      The piano, and indeed most musical instruments in the Western tradition, are based off of the chromatic scale. What the chromatic scale is is the combination of all the primary divisions as well as the midway points between them. The chromatic scale in the Western tradition can be written out like so:

      C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab, A, A#/Bb, C

      You’ll notice that C#/Db, D#/Eb, and so forth are all the same notes. This is musically significant and something worth paying attention to. It’s going to play a role in the rest of this book and the rest of your musical career as a whole.

      The musical division between all of these notes is equivalent and is referred to as a half-step. If you were to first play a C then play a C#, the difference between those notes would be a half-step; the same applies for G# to A, for F to F#, and for B to C, as well as any other side-by-side set of notes in the chromatic scale just listed off.

      If you’re playing guitar, then the neck is divided into half-step frets. The same is true for ukeleles and pianos as well, though on pianos the half-steps are denoted by different keys.

      Don’t be confused, notes can be broken into smaller chunks - they could technically be broken down into millionth-step variations, though that would be long before there was any sort of discernible tonal difference between the notes. In the Western musical tradition, the most notes will ever be broken down is generally into quarter-tones, and even then, this is extremely, extremely rare; these pieces are generally very rarely performed and are equally rarely composed for the reason that it’s just impractical for the vast majority of instruments (it requires special guitars and pianos, for instance), or takes an extreme amount of ear training and vigilance on others (violins and violas can play quarter tones with ease, but the difference is difficult to discern, often.)

      A difference of two half-steps is referred to as a whole step. Whole steps are the difference between any two white keys separated by a black key on a piano, or two frets

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