Why You Don’t Need to Know Every Scale to be Creative
1. The Myth of Mastery
Scales are a fundamental part of music. They are what we use in order to write music and understand the music that we are playing. For example, if a piece of music is in the key of G major, then knowing a G major scale will mean that we know which notes are going to be used in that piece of music. Scales also allow us to standardise the fingers that we use and build dexterity in our fingers. However, a scale is simply defined as “a set of notes”, so there are endless numbers of scales that we can learn or create.
This can become very overwhelming very quickly and it often leads to players knowing how to theoretically form scales, but not having any degree of fluency in actually playing them or recognising them within music.
The way to solve this is to perfect a few scales rather than attempting to learn many scales on a more surface level. This allows you to learn better because it utilises a technique called “spaced repetition”. This is when you initially learn something new, you have a much smaller “repetition window” between review sessions, over time, the repetition window increases as you learn the material better. If you attempt to learn too much material, it becomes significantly more difficult to review the learned material regularly enough after you first learn it.
2. Creativity is Connection, not Collection
In order to be able to fully utilise something, you have to innately know it. When we speak, we don’t really have to think very much about the words that we are using. However, if you have ever tried to learn a new language, you may know that trying to use words you aren’t 100% familiar and comfortable with is much more challenging.
Learning scales is not a game of playing the scales correctly, it’s not even a game of knowing which sharps/flats are used within the scale. It’s a game of knowing it so well that when you think of that scale and look at the piano, your brain blocks out all of the notes you won’t need. This means that you could play a scale comfortably and know what notes are in the scale, but still need to spend some time in order to be able to use the scale practically and freely.
An interesting way to test this is to try and improvise using the scale by playing triads in your left hand and a melody in your right hand. If you are able to use only chords that belong to the scale in the left hand and only melody notes from the scale with little thought, then you know the scale well!
3. Make More with Less
Creativity is often thought of as creating something out of nothing. However, it doesn’t really work like that. Creativity is actually often much easier when you have very tight constraints on what you can create. Rather than writing a novel about anything (for example), you would likely find much more success if you were limited to writing a spy novel set in the 1930s. These constraints allow you to more narrowly focus on creating the exact sentiment and story that you want to create.
The same is true for music! You can play anything on the piano, but this can be overwhelming and lead to analysis paralysis. Whereas if you try to play a romantic piece using a D major scale, this is much narrower and can allow you to more easily find the sentiment and story you want to tell and get very good at it!
Ultimately, there is very little benefit to knowing how to play 100 scales if you don’t know them innately. Whereas knowing just a handful of scales very well can dramatically improve the way you learn and create music. So, if you are the type of player that knows many scales on a surface level, try spending a couple of weeks really learning just a couple of scales and see what difference it makes!
Matthew Cawood
(This is from my “Monday Music Tips“ weekly email newsletter. Join my mailing list to be emailed with future posts.)