Hi there guys, it's Rick here. Hope you're all doing extremely well out there. I know I am. Today we're going to take a look at the melodic minor scale and I'm aiming this tutorial at the rock player that's kind of looking to branch out and play a little bit beyond sort of the normal rock scale. So you know, standard, diatonic stuff and modal stuff. So I'm going to give you the approach that I took with this kind of thing and give you some hints and tips, hopefully some ideas of different ways that you can approach the scale and you can apply that to other scales that you already know. So we will get into that in due course. So firstly, what is the melodic minor scale? Well, there's a number of different ways of looking at it. We can see it as a Dorian mode with a major seventh or a major scale with a flattened third. So if we're in the key of GM, I'm going to use the key of G because that's the back interact that I'm going to be using demonstrating the scale over. So we're going to start here. So what we have is... Okay, so... So as I said before, you can either see it as a Dorian mode, the major seventh or a major scale with a minor third in it. I prefer to kind of see it as just a melodic minor scale to be honest, but whichever way helps you any way that a cis-sue in learning the scale is going to be useful. So... Okay, back when I first learned the scale, as I said before, I come from a kind of rock background where I did three note per string practice the whole time to learn the scales, shapes all the way across the fretboard. So I applied that approach to this scale. Why not, indeed, there's absolutely nothing wrong with it. So that's what we're going to start with. I'm going to play each single position for you to play along with. So one through seven. Okay, let's do it. So... Okay, good. Now that's all seven positions with three notes on every single. Now what I want to do is kind of take a kind of different approach to learning the scale. And one of the things that really helped me was to approach the scale in terms of thirds. Because it's got... This... the make up for this particular scale has got a very distinctive pattern. And if I show you exactly what I mean, there are a sequence of minor thirds and major thirds within the scale. I'm just going to show it to you just on one string. It's a really, really useful way of approaching it. But we are going to use pairs of strings shortly. But we're going to start here. So we're going to organize it in terms of thirds. So to start with, we get... The first and the third degree. So that's a minor third. Then we get another minor third. Then we get three successive major thirds. Then minor third, then a minor third. And then we're back to the start again. So... Okay, so let's hear that over the backing track. Okay, good. So that actually really, really helped me to kind of identify where I was within the scale. Rather than relying on three note string scales, it's a little bit of a haphazard way of doing it. And it doesn't kind of encapsulate the sound of a chord very well if you're just running scales up and down. So I found that identifying where those major thirds were and where the minor thirds were in terms of the scale really, really helped me. So that's one approach that we're going to use. And you can do that on every single string. So start from the first note. It's a minor third. So we get minor third. Minor third. Major third. I'm the third. Another major third. Starting on the fourth degree. And the major third. Starting on the fifth. So the major thirds come on the third, fourth and fifth degrees of the scale. So... If we start here, that's our fourth degree. So we know that that's the second of our major thirds. You can see where I'm going here. It's really, really useful. If we go on to the D string, we get a major seventh here. In fact, let's start here at the sixth. Minor third. Seventh is a minor third. Rook is a minor third. Second is a minor third. Major third. And so on. It makes it so much easier to learn. You can do that all the way across our strings here. So we're approaching this rather than in a vertical. In a vertical fashion, we're doing it in a horizontal fashion. Really, really useful to that. One thing I like to do is start on the sixth degree of the melodic minor scale. Because what that does, it organizes our major minor third intervals. So they're easier to spot. So we get a succession of four minor third intervals and three major third intervals. I hope you're following me here. So we're starting on the sixth degree of a G melodic minor scale. You get minor third. So a succession of four minor thirds followed by three major thirds. And we can just keep going. So that really, really helps me to identify, to sort of separate the scale. So. The other thing about this scale as well is that if you take scale segments. To start the seventh degree, we get essentially a small segment of a half-hole scale. Half-hole. Half-hole. But from the third degree, we get a whole-time scale. So there's lots of different ways that you can approach the melodic minor scale. Rather than just seeing it as just shapes to learn, you can really sort of take the scale apart and work out what the thirds are. And this really, really helped me know when to learn the scale. Because it forces you to think sort of more intervalically than shape-wise. Because there's no getting away from shapes as guitar players. We play shapes constantly on the instrument. However, we can sort of change our perception of it by thinking in terms of intervals, thinking intervalically. And it will really help you break out of the monotony of just running scales up and down. Because that's where I find a lot of frustration comes from. And it's literally scales up and down. And there doesn't seem to be any sort of musical element to what we're playing. However, it's still important to practice those three note-bestring scale shapes. Because there are, you know, there's a benefit with all sorts of approaches. And learning it three note-bestring is going to help you as well. But if you do it in conjunction with this kind of intervalic way of thinking about the scale, I think you'll really benefit. So what we can do with the thirds, rather than just keeping our string, let's do it with pairs. So... So if we start here on the root, we get two minor thirds, then we're on to a major third. So that's our succession of three major thirds. Minor third, minor third, minor third, major third. Okay. So once we've done that, we can apply sequential pattern to it. So that's the lift-rate. It's taking the third ascending through it from the root, then descending on the next third. And then we've removed the pattern from the root, sorry, removed the pattern from the root. Descending. So hopefully that's given you some ideas as to how you can sort of incorporate the melodic minor scale into your vocabulary. And do it in a much more musical way than just playing scales up and down. But that is why I've included the three note-bestring melodic minor shapes, because they're still useful. So you know, it advise you to practice this particular scale and all scales in as many different ways as you possibly can. I'm going to continue this series with some melodic minor ideas, so I hope you've enjoyed this first session. So look out for more videos coming very, very soon. And to finish, please check out my website, still 20% off. So I will leave the link in the description box below, so click that, check that out. And I will see you in the next video. Cheers guys!