Everything exists already — every note, every interval, every possible scale has been mapped and catalogued. So why bother “creating” your own? Because the process of building something yourself teaches you things that reading a list never could, and it might lead you to sounds you would never have found otherwise.
What you’ll get out of this lesson
You’ll learn five practical methods for deriving your own scales from the materials you already know — methods that develop fretboard visualisation, deepen your understanding of interval colour, and give you a way to find the exact sound you need in any musical situation without having to look it up.
Why “Creating” Scales Still Makes Sense
The analogy at the heart of this lesson is a simple one: you could buy a chair from a furniture store, or you could build one yourself using your own materials and judgement. The store-bought chair might not look very different in the end, but the process of building it will develop skills and insights you couldn’t have gained any other way. The same is true of scale construction. All these note combinations already exist — Marty Friedman’s distinctive scales, for instance, turn out to be pre-existing Japanese scales — but Friedman found them by exploring, not by consulting a scale dictionary, and that process is what shaped his unique voice. We can all have that.
Addition and Reduction
The first method is the most under-discussed: taking a scale you know and either adding notes to it or removing them. Consider the A minor pentatonic against the A Dorian mode — the Dorian contains all the pentatonic notes plus two more. But you never hear someone play minor pentatonic and think they’re playing Dorian, because the overall “wash of colour” — the residual sound the ear holds onto — is completely different. Take one note away from a scale and you’ve changed its harmonic texture in a way that isn’t obvious from simply examining the interval list. Add the blues note (the flat five) to a minor pentatonic and you have something that sounds nothing like “minor pentatonic with an extra note” — it becomes a different entity. This principle gives you direct control over the sound world you’re inhabiting.
Although everything exists, it’s about what choices you make. Creating your own scales is about making your own choices.
Alteration
The second method is alteration: take a scale and systematically raise or lower individual degrees by a semitone, listening carefully to the result. Working through the major scale degree by degree — what does it sound like if I flatten the second? If I sharpen the fourth? — exposes you to modal colours and exotic sounds you might never have sought out deliberately. The discipline of doing this methodically, rather than at random, builds a real mental map of how individual intervals contribute to overall colour.
Working Without a Name
One of the most liberating ideas in this lesson is that you don’t need to know what a scale is called in order to use it. If you can construct it from your knowledge of intervals and you can hear that it fits the harmonic situation, that’s enough. You might later discover it has a name — or it might not. What matters is that you can find what you need by ear and by logic, in real time, without having to recall a label. That’s a genuine real-world skill that serves you in any playing situation, whether you’re improvising freely or working out a specific sound for a composition.
Taking it further
The five methods covered in this presentation — addition, reduction, alteration, and the others explored in the video — are most useful when you keep a record of what you discover. Notate the scales that interest you, even just as an interval list (e.g. 1, b2, 3, 4, 5, b6, b7), and revisit them. Some will feel immediately usable; others will need context before they make sense musically. Both responses are informative.
Your homework
Take the major scale and systematically alter the second degree — first flatten it, then sharpen it — listening to each result over a major chord drone. Notate both resulting scales as interval formulas. Then do the same with the third degree. You’ll end up with four distinct scales, all derived from one exercise. Pay attention to which one excites you most and spend a few minutes improvising with just that one.