I have been playing for 1 year 7 months. I had a teacher for my first year and he gave me a huge technique schedule to work on. Part of this was playing each mode with a metronome and upping the time when I could. To me this is boring. I am into music like Robert Cray, Eric Clapton, Buddy Guy, SRV and so on. Are practicing these modes going to help me play like the guys I want to play like? I could care less about being a shredder and thats the main place I see these modes. For someone wanting to play Blues, Classic Rock and Southern Rock is practicing these modes a waste of my time?
Yes.
Apply the same practice techniques to the pentatonic and blues scales - that's what's useful for the music you like.
Then learn the chord structures, and add "outside" notes (notes not found in the scale, but supported by the chords).
Modes are highly over-rated, and aren't actually used in many styles of music... and for that matter, many of the guitarists who talk about how they use modes really aren't using them at all!
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Thanks, for the advice. I have felt like I am spinning my wheels working with modes. I have been working with the scales you mentioned but working with the modes seems to be getting in the way of my interests.
How Important Are Modes?
More important than navel fluff. But not much ;)
I teach my students to totally ignore modes.
Learn the major and minor scales (natural, melodic and harmonic), the pentatonic scales (major and minor), the diminshed scales and the whole tone scales.
If you KNOW those scales well, there is nothing you can't play by thinking in terms of scales and altered scales.
There are musical genres where modal scales are very important, but for most stuff they're more marketing fluff than musical bedrock. And those genres where it they are important (such as modal jazz) are engageable by beginning students without touching on modes anyway.
Don't focus on just playing scales. Focus on learning scales. And there's a real difference.
If you look down and you see your finger on a particular fret and string, do you instantly KNOW the names that tone goes by? Do you know the scales those various notes appear in? Do you know which one's are relative to each other? Do you know what degrees of those scales the note is?
Too many players practice their scales by playing them and forget about thinking about them. Drilling scales is just as much about drilling the mind as it is about drilling the fingers!
Get the major scales down first, then their related natural minors. That alone will take a couple of years. Than you can start adding diminished scales, melodic and harmonic minors, and the whole tone scale. Getting all of that in one's brain so that it's recallable as an automatic response as natural as speaking is a five year to decade long process for most people.
If after that you want to add modes, go for it. But you won't ever really need them.
"The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side." -- HST
