Every Version Of The Major Scale You’d Ever Need

Do you know what an NPC is? If you’re not a video game nerd like me, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of it.

In video games, NPC stands for ‘non-player character’. It’s basically any character in a game that’s not you: the player. 

NPCs usually only have a set amount of things they can say and do – mostly just enough to push the game forward or teach you how the game works.

But you can’t interact with an NPC like you can with a real person. You can’t, for example, have a ‘human’ conversation with an NPC. They have:

• Limited vocabulary
• Limited variation in what they do and say, which means;
• They’ll inevitably end up repeating and doing the same things over and over – like a broken record

All these things are fine when it comes to video games – you usually don’t need anything more from an NPC.

If you want to play music though – having a limited vocabulary, limited variation and playing the same thing over and over – those usually end up backfiring. 

This is especially true if you want to put your own spin on a song, a bass line or do any sort of improvising.

The sad thing is that a lot of bass players end up just like NPCs when they learn new things on bass. They learn to play something for the first time, and usually they don’t try to learn any other ways of playing it.

That means they’re stuck with this single way of playing something. 

But music isn’t a video game

Playing bass with other real people means that you’re guaranteed to come across situations that you didn’t plan for. 

You’ll find that you’ve ‘played yourself into a corner’ and if you only have one way of getting around your bass, you’ll end up stumbling over notes, making mistakes, falling out of the pocket, getting lost in the form… 

All because of a lack of variation.

So today, I want to take it back to basics and show you how to add tons of variation in the way you play something as fundamental as the major scale. 

NPC Bassist vs. non-NPC Bassist

An ‘NPC’ bassist would learn the ‘standard’ way of playing the major scale. A non-NPC bassist would have tons of different ways of getting around using the major scale. 

Which bassist is going to be more prepared when unexpected things happen in the music? The one that has more ways of doing the same thing, right?

Why use the major scale for this kind of exercise? Because it gets used in just about every style of music at some point, you can build all the other modes from it (so you can use the same method for all of them too), you can build chords from the major scale – the list goes on!

In short, the better you know this rudimentary piece of the music puzzle, the easier everything else gets for you.

Check out the lesson here:

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The purpose of this video isn’t to give you absolutely every different possible combination of notes to create the major scale – it’s to give you options to start with and get you thinking about different ways of playing everything. The more variation you have, the less of a bassist-NPC you’ll be.

You can apply this same exact method to other scales or exercises you’re already doing, bass lines, fills or licks you know or even melodies or improvising.

If you can do this with something as fundamental as the major scale though, you’ll be in prime position to apply this idea to everything else.

Like I say in the video:

You can never be too good at the fundamentals!

Good luck with the lesson and happy playing!

Cheers,