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Day Two Hundred Seventy Eight (Year Three)

Ten years ago today, Apple Inc. changed the music world forever by launching a tiny little thing called the itunes store.

Had to get that in there somewhere, now on to my revelation of the day.  All through church this morning, I was visualizing scales on the fretboard.  I started with something easy... E minor pentatonic, and kept working my way through various scales.  Somewhere in the middle, it dawned on me: in my efforts on learning both scales and fretboard organization, I have always separated the two things by at least a small margin.  It never really occurred to me until today that learning the way that the notes are laid out, and learning the scales should be as connected as possible.  When I write that out, it looks incredibly stupid and seems so amazingly obvious, I mean the notes make up the scales, so it's not implausible that the two be inter-related.

Here, I think, is what I'm really trying to get at.  When I learn a scale, I learn the pattern, and then learn the notes underneath that pattern.  What I feel like I need to start doing is learning the pattern (or reading the tab), and putting the names of the notes next to the fingerings.  That way, I get the finger placement and the note name together, and then only have to look at where the note falls on the staff.

Other obligations kept me from really diving into the ideas that are flying around inside my head, but tomorrow night is wide open, and I am definitely sitting down and trying some things out!

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