Is it just me, or do some of you fail to see the point of Scale Spy?
I get that it's teaching us the sound of individual scales, but how is this any use in the music world?
For example, if you play me major scale and a mixolydian scale, I'll probably be able to tell you which is which. However, if you play me a song written in a major key and another written in a mixolydian mode, I seriously doubt I'd know the difference. So what then, is the point of Scale Spy?
For me, knowing the sounds of the various scales is helpful for playing in a jazz band and improvising. I can (a tiny bit!) recognize the color notes being used which helps me respond to a soloist, for example.
Just to elaborate a bit on my previous answer, just because you can't CONSCIOUSLY tell the difference between one scale and another doesn't mean they don't make a MUSICAL or EMOTIONAL difference. Aligning our conscious processes with our subconscious ones is what this whole process of learning music more deeply is all about. This allows us to enact our artistic intent more surely and deliberately. I definitely feel that I'm better able to hear when something isn't quite right (and separate that out from self-doubt that might be lying to me) and know what to do about it. Anything that trains you on recognizing the difference between different techniques, structures, and concepts helps with that.
It's useless if it's a sole focus of musicality development, it's ok as a niche supplemental practice.
In my opinion, for most tonal music (including jazz) it's way more important to hear pitches in-key within the major (or relative minor scale) of the song's key. All diatonic and non-diatonic chords come out from this same scale. For example, when you go through a simple 2-5-1, it doesn't sound like dorian into mixolydian into ionian (that's what chord scale people want you to believe but it's not the way it's perceived emotionally), it sounds like scale tones of the major scale rotating to follow harmony. It's particularly apparent when analyzing vocal lines or lyrical solos like But Not For Me by Chet Baker. Melodies flow elegantly through changes instead of jumping from one mode to another.
Another example is all the mixolydian/altered/diminished scales. Those definitely don't make any sense in isolation and should be looked at within the context of how they resolve, which in most cases again means within the context of some kind of a 2-5-1, major or minor. That way it's also much easier to see parallels between them all and how they all are different colors/variations of the V chord. Going deeper there are very curious intersections with other dominants from the family like tritone subs and backdoor dominants. There are a lot of shared scale tones when looked from this angle. But these patterns are impossible to see when looking at these scales in a vacuum.
Sure, there is modal harmony and modal jazz and modal vamps too, but it's not how most of the tonal music works.
Now, given that, the reason I don't like the Scale Spy is because it fails to put these scales in context. Like I mentioned, playing lines under the ii chord will not sound like a Dorian mode, even though technically the notes come from it. It will sound like you are playing around the chord tones of the ii chord, and there are functional implications of it then pivoting to V and then to I and it's a very big difference perception-wise from when we truly are in dorian mode.
If one goes through transcribing a 6-2-5-1 line with only 2 beats per chord and you try to hear each section of the line within the chord scale related to a chord (mixolydian/aeolian into dorian into mixolydian into ionian), you'll go nuts and/or probably will not truly internalize the line in the end.
TL;DR: there is a long-standing big confusion between purely modal music and diatonic modes/scales within tonal functional music.
This article is informative and helpful. 😁 I also found it extremely interesting on the theory about why polyrhythms were thought to have originated in cultures from the African deserts... I never really thought about it but it makes sense... Polyrhythms sound bad in rooms with a lot of reverberation because it smears or blurs the attack of the notes.
A passionate artist who transitioned from performing to producing his own music after overcoming the setbacks of the COVID-19 pandemic while also perfecting his cheesecake-making skills on the side.
