I was watching a music theory lesson, given by a professor in a university, in which he said something that confuse me. He told his students to write down the major scale every day until it became "photographic" in memory, as he did himself every day for an entire year according to him.
My method of figuring out scales has always been mostly through counting and knowing the intervals. My view, i can create any chord or scale i want, with minimal effort. Even getting to a point where i can do this comfortability was work more educational and a lot less laborious compared to remembering a list of notes for every major scale.
This made me wonder if it's a difference in perspective. for instance, i only ever make music through DAW's, counting intervals is more easy, i think, it's like eagle perspective. But i still can not understand this way of teaching, there is a specific system underneath it all that connects the dots, i think focusing on understanding that would be a lot more useful.
Let me knonw what you think :-D

 

Making an assumption on what the teacher means here.

The instruction makes sense if the discipline is "writing music on staff paper".
So, writing the scales out on staff paper, using actual notes gives one an ability to recognize scales written on staff paper, thus facilitating both cold reading and writing music.

 

To be honest I don't see any point in doing this exercise.
You can construct the major scale easily from any point.
If you know the Intervals 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 then you can logically build the scale.

To me it was always a matter of being able to understand the construction of a scale pattern instead of memorizing each major scale.
If we talk about practical usage then it's a different topic. Then you won't be able to bypass memorizing some patterns on your instrument.

Most of the time you will have musical pieces that you want to analyze so you won't just have a scale written down.
Then it come's down to recognizing the root note and building a scale from the other notes due to their interval relationsship.

Maybe it helps recognizing the scale faster written on paper but why spent so much time on it ?
There are many other things that I would rather practice than the fast recognition of scales on paper

 

Last edited: Aug 30, 2022

I don't know the context, but sounds like a dumb idea.