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Day Two Hundred Eighty One (Year Four)

So, I'm not sure if it's a result of staring at scales in between calls the last couple of days, or if it's having to write things out in order to study them at work, or what, but tonight's theory efforts felt better than last night's.

I'm inclined to believe that I'm actually spending enough time with it the last couple of days that things are getting to the point where they are getting easier.  It's moments like this that cause me to realize two things about myself:

1) If I had been smarter about my practice time as a teenager and twenty-something, I'd be much farther along than I am right now.

2) On some level, I will always be completely jealous of the fact that my brother gets to study music in college.  He has to practice and learn theory FOR CREDIT... FOR CLASS!

Anyway, I'm finally coming around to understanding a couple of things when it comes to how this will work best for me going forward.  They are:

1) That I need to get inside my head, and go back and use some of my memories from orchestra in high school, just in terms of the approach to working on scales and positions and such.  Every day in class, my orchestra director would call out a random scale, and we would use that as a way to warm up.  You never knew what was coming, so you had to be able to play whatever he called out on the fly.  I need to do that with guitar.

2) It seems like people either spend their time talking about patterns when it comes to scales, or they spend their time talking about note names.  Why is it that they never put the two together?  Sure, it's convenient to be able to learn the patterns, but knowing the notes is equally valuable.  I've gotten caught up in focusing on either one or the other, and the obvious dawned on me tonight.  The real key (duh) is learning both.  Learn the pattern first, but once you do, running the corresponding notes in your head will help to solidify learning, not just of scales, but also of note locations.

Sometimes it's the obvious things that stare you right in the face that you need to slow down enough to realize.
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