Upon first glance at The Efficient Guitarist, you may feel like the scale forms are the most important concept in the book.  This is something that I get a ton of questions about.  I’d like to finally take some time an explain what the forms mean and what you should worry about.  To start with, the forms are a completely arbitrary thing.  They don’t really mean anything.  At this point, I’ve never heard anyone use the same terms for the individual forms.  You can’t go to another teacher and ask for Form IV pentatonic licks.  It’s not a standard term.  So, why did I create the forms?  I didn’t.  They created themselves.  I simply observed that they were present and notated them.  I want to get as far away from the idea that TEG is a mathematical book, or something overly theoretical.  It was never intended as such.

When I was a kid, I played 100% by ear.  I heard sounds on my favorite CDs and reacted to them on my guitar.  I distinctly remember playing up and down one string playing over Metallica’s “Fade to Black.”  At the time, I had no idea it was an E minor scale.  At the time, I was a thrilled 16 year old who was starting to make music on a brand new instrument: the guitar.  As I kept playing, I started to see single string shapes on each individual string.  Once I had figured out the horizontal schema of this sound (and I say sound because at the time, I had no other idea what to call it), I started to notice that there were vertical shapes, too.  This happened over the course of a few weeks.  I didn’t set out to look at it this way, but once I gave the neck some thought, I saw five distinct, clear patterns.  I wrote them out on graph paper from my fathers desk and named them forms I—forms V.  The Efficient Guitarist was born on graph paper in my den in the spring of 1995.

Fast-forward a few months, to the National Guitar Workshop.  My parents sent me to the five-week program to study guitar at NGW.  It was at the NGW that I started to learn more about theory and how scales were constructed.  I was pretty amazed that major, minor and modal scales kept fitting into my five forms.  Even the pentatonic scales fit into the forms (albeit leaving some notes out, but they still fit).  No matter what the amazing NGW instructors threw at me, I could see it in the shapes.

At 16 years old, I wasn’t thinking about a pedagogical system.  I was just trying to find a way to play the guitar better.  For better or worse, this seemed to make sense to me.  I was able to play in every key, in every scale/mode with relative ease.  I never referred to the forms by names.  They were much like interconnecting Tetris pieces to me.  I would place my fingers on a certain point on the fingerboard and explore by ear.  I’d find a form by feel.  Once I knew where I was, I knew what shape was to the right of the form and what form was to the left.  Again, this was organic.  I was never thinking about the numbers.  I was still 100% playing by ear.  If you had asked me to play in the D minor with earplugs in, I’d be sunk.  My ear always got me started and my ear and brain were able to collaborate to get me the rest of the way.

Fast-forward a whole bunch of years to my post college years.  I had filled in a ton of gaps in my knowledge over those years.  I was also starting to the teach guitar more regularly.  I started to codify what would become TEG in 2001, even though TEG didn’t really come together until 2006.  I was faced with a hard problem—how could I pass on this method when so much of it happened on its own?  This was and will continue to be the most challenging aspect of teaching TEG.  What I ended up understanding through many years of teaching was the following:

• No matter how much I wanted to, the only thing that I could communicate were the forms themselves.
• No matter how much I wanted to, I could never teach the organic process of combination of forms.
• No matter how much I wanted to, I could never take a limited student and make them a musician with just the forms.

What I could do is take a student with talent and instincts and give them a roadmap for growth.  I was able to take students who were playing a single pentatonic scale and give them the keys to unlock the neck.  I’ve seen dramatic transformations because of TEG.  So many times, I was confronted with talented students with great instincts who were simply stuck.  TEG helped many of them out.  I’ve also seen very intelligent students who understood the system, but lacked the musical talent to make it into good music.  They could play up and down the neck in any key, but not necessarily make music with it.

So, then, what is TEG and how do you use it?

TEG is the map for your fingerboard.  It’s going to take the neck and break it down into its simplest parts for you to combine and recombine them into music.  The analogy to a map is very important to me.  You have to decide to take the individual turns, the map can only direct you to available roads.  You have to supply the inspiration and the sense of exploration.  I can only provide you with choices.

Do you still think about forms when you play?

I think about music when I play.  I try to imagine really cool things to play in my head before I play them.  I’m always trying to synthesize music mentally before the physical world has to intervene.  The second that I think about music and hear it in my head, I hear it attached to shapes/notes.  That’s the critical difference to me.  The forms don’t dictate anything.  I dream of music divorced from any shapes.  I realize those dreams by taking my ideas and translating them to the guitar.  I hear the guitar in shapes.  I just can’t help it.

I’ll give you an example.  I’m listening to iTunes as I write this.  Pat Metheny is on.  As he plays, I am seeing the shape of what he’s playing in my mind.  I could pick up the guitar an replay exactly what he played because I know the map.  It’s almost as if I was watching Pat playing a gig and recognized that he was playing in Time Square, in New York City.  I could consult my map and drive to Times Square.  TEG allows me to know where to play the sounds that I hear and imagine.

My experience has taught me that many guitarists think this way, too.  The vast majority of guitarists deal with the ubiquitous minor pentatonic scale as their main improvisatory vehicle.  As a result, many guitarists are able to play licks, phrases and solos by ear using the pentatonic scale.  They are able to do this because they are able to anticipate what the notes in the scale sound like before they play them.  Spend enough time in a scale shape and you can do that, too.  TEG takes this idea, expands it to the entire neck and teaches some theory as it goes.  That’s all it does.  I hope this helps you start to understand what TEG is and how I approach it.  Clearly, the series isn’t finished as I haven’t gotten into application.  Just to reiterate that: TEG Book I does not talk about application.  It simply deals with the shapes themselves and how to position those shapes.  I’ll start talking about application in this blog and roll that into the future TEG books.

Until next time…

Marc