ARTIST: Joe Satriani
GENRE: Rock, Art Rock, Blues Rock
CONCEPTS: Target notes, pentatonic scales, melodic phrasing, ballad soloing
SOURCE: Guitar World
TOPIC: Joe Satriani on scales

I was left to my own devices to practice. The idea behind learning scales I think was really revolutionized by my high-school music theory teacher who pointed out to me a couple of different things.

"He said that by the time I grew up, it may turn out I wasn't such a good guitar player that I thought I was gonna be, but I shouldn't let that hold me back. That the most important musical development was gonna take place in my mind. And that was limitless, so just keep feeding it, keep developing it.

"And one of the things that he did was to instruct me to sing scales to learn their intervals, to know what it was on paper, and to be able to generate it with my voice in any key that my vocal chords would allow. And then to look at it on the guitar, but not in terms of performance, but just in terms of learning what the space between each note really felt like.

"So I'm in G right now, I'm playing the notes of the G major scale. But he had me singing one, two, one, three, one, four, one, five, one, six, one, seven, one, one. And if those notes would be altered for a scale then I would say that altered interval. Like: one, flat second, one, major third, one, augmented fourth, one, augmented fifth... I would sing those notes in succession and I would have these little flash cards that had 15 scales on them. And I would learn how to play those scales in two octaves. I think that came from Billy Bauer.

"Billy Bauer was a local guitar teacher in Glen Cove. I'm not really quite sure how my mother discovered that he was in Glen Cove giving lessons. I don't think she knew that he used to play with Lennie Tristano. I certainly didn't. I didn't even know who Lennie was at the time. But I would appear down at the dinner table after practicing for hours and hours saying 'I've gotta find somebody to tell me what's going on. I'm just whipping myself to death and I don't know what I'm doing.

Billy gave me a lot of information. I took three lessons from him but I got back these little pamphlets on scales and arpeggios and things. It was a great way to organize it, especially for the singing exercise. Because I could just sort of forget about it and start singing, 'One, augmented fourth, one, five...' and really start to feel the difference in my body and hear it in my body.

"And then I could start to look at it but I kept thinking, 'I don't care what it looks like yet.' I'm just thinking about if I hear those two notes coming from a song on a radio I want my brain to say 'I know that! I recognize those two notes.'

"That was sort of like what Bill Wescott, my high-school music teacher, was trying to get at. He wanted me to do this 'one, major second, one, major third, one, perfect fourth, one, augmented fourth, one, perfect fifth...' And I would go through major, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, natural minor scale, Locrian, Phrygian dominant, harmonic minor, melodic minor... I think that was about it around that time, that were all the scales that I was thinking about.

"I didn't bother with the pentatonic scales or anything less than seven-note scales. I don't even think I bothered with the diminished scale either. That was enough actually, just that. And I think I stayed in G because it was the only part of my vocal chords that would really hold steady long enough.

"Once I started to think about this long enough, I though. 'Well, I should be able to do it against a pedal note.' And I started doing that sitting down at a piano because it seemed a little bit easier. Because I wanted to do it in C or G or different keys and it's very hard on the guitar.

"So if I have this E drone and then I start playing the notes. And I just sort of soak it in and then I play something slightly different, which is a Lydian scale – major scale with a raised fourth. And I sort of register in my mind why is it so different than [the major scale]. With this note [drone E] it really made a difference because I could hear the tension and not so much tension. So when I did other [modes] it really made big difference to Phrygian dominant versus a Phrygian.

"And I was sort of making the fingering upas I went along. Since my high-school teacher was not a guitarist, he would look at me play guitar and go, 'It's so complicated, you just have to learn the notes everywhere.' And I thought 'That's easier said than done!' [Laughs] You just can't look at it and find them.

"But actually, yes, you can just look at it and find them. So why couldn't I? It's because I don't know the names of the notes. That was another big deal. And although I had a bunch of my time with all these things - learning the chords, learning the scales, singing the scales and the modes, figuring out the different fingerings, one octave, two octaves, three octave plus, all over, scales on one string at a time, learn the names of the notes on every string on every fret - I still had the school to go to and trouble to get in and all sorts of stuff. [Laughs]

"Eventually I said, 'Okay, I'm going to find E everywhere and I'll do that for five minutes. And then I'll do a couple of finger exercises. And then I'll do that where I'm singing [the intervals]. It was like building a giant structure starting with a big block of stone. I just though it's gonna work. Eventually there will be a beautiful statue here but I'm just gonna have to chip away at it bit by bit. But that's how I started it, that was really the beginning of working on those scales.

"The greatest resource now is just type it in and the internet will give you a million versions of where and how to play it. And just pick one, start from there. And most of the time the internet's correct, so you've got that going for ya.

