[Harp-L] re:scales and positions

[mik jagger <harpomatic@xxxxxxxxx>]

There are all kinds of scales - major, minor, etc, but only one "MAIN'' scale - chromatic. Learn that one, and you learned them all. Scales are like some distilled versions of persistent archetypal tunes or songs, but as anyone will tell you they are not "composed musical pieces"  as such, they are more of an educational/practice aid for a playing musician. As a training tool, chromatic scale is the most useful one to practice and covers all the notes. It is hard to cleanly get on diatonic, though definitely possible, and easy to do on chromatic. As to positions - there are schools of thought on this topic, but try to consider this approach: chromatic scale throughout the entire instrument's range, with no preference given to which note you start on - that will cover ALL the music in the entire western repertoire. Again, hard to do on the diatonic (not all the notes and positions are the same to me there), but easy on the chromatic.