Scale Trainer Overview

Video Overview

About Scale Trainer

Scale Trainer is an interactive exercise in the Learning Portal for Jamstik that takes you step by step through playing common scales and scale shapes on your Jamstik.

There is a set of curated Scale Trainer exercises that the Learning Portal for Jamstik will take you through if you click either "Play AI Suggested Learning Activity" or "Play Suggested Scale Exercise". To set up your own scale trainer exercise or change general scale trainer settings, tap "Custom Scale Exercise".

Scale Trainer Setup

Basic Options

At the top, you can pick the type of scale or scale mode you want to play. You can see the scale change in the preview below.

Next you can pick a root note or scale shape. Included in the list are open note scales as well as common scale shapes for each scale. These scale shapes are great to learn and allow you to play scales across the entire fretboard by only learning a few shapes.

Below this, you can pick your backing track. There are melodic backing tracks that will play accompaniment based around the root note of a scale as well as percussive tracks and a metronome track that are best for keeping time.

Finally, you can pick the speed of the scale exercise on the slider. Don't be afraid to pick a faster speed to challenge yourself as there is no penalty for missing notes in scale trainer.

Advanced Options

On the Advanced Options page, you can set your scale pattern. Experiment with these to find the scale that fits your practice style the best. It can be helpful when you are starting off to pick a "tonic to Tonic" pattern to best get a feel for the scales.

Pattern Repeat will change how many times you go through the scale in one exercise.

Appearance Settings

In appearance settings you can pick either Finger Number or Note Name for your scale trainer bubbles. Note name can be helpful for memorizing the fretboard and learning theory, while Finger Number shows suggested finger numbers for each note and may be useful if you are new to practicing scale shapes on guitar. 

You can change your color scheme. Pick from one of the preset color schemes for scale trainer or create your own by tapping on each color. For now, we will refer to the colors in the Default color scheme.

Changes made in the appearance section will affect all scale trainer exercises.

Scale Trainer Explanation

When you first enter a scale trainer exercise, preview mode will be active. This shows you an example of the scale you are about to play. When you are ready to play the scale, tap the play button on the fretboard.

In scale trainer, you play through a scale in time to a backing track. The next note you should play is in yellow. If you are using a Jamstik model with fretsense, the note may change color when it is fretted. When the blue oval closes in on that note and turns white, you should fret and play that note. You must strum the note, on time, when the oval closes in on the note to move on to the next note. To help keep you in time, there is also a blue pulse on the side of the fretboard area.

When you have successfully played a note in time, that note will turn green and the next note for you to play will turn yellow.

If you fret or play an incorrect note, it will show up in red as shown above.

Right below the progress bar is the roadmap view. This will always show notes names as well as the notes you play don't play in a scale.

If you want to pause and change the song speed you can tap on the pause button on top of the progress bar. When you are ready to continue tap the play button.

A Scale Trainer exercise ends when the progress bar at the top of the screen is full.

When you finish an exercise, you can see how long you've practiced this scale and other scales. Tapping Play Again - will let you play the scale exercise again -- Play Next Scale will start the next suggested scale trainer exercise -- and play ai suggested exercise will take you to your next exercise in the Learning Portal for Jamstik.

And that's it. You can now play suggested scales or make your own scale trainer exercises. If you want to play or practice scales or scale positions that are not in scale trainer, be sure to check out the full scale library in Open Play.