Scales

Every note of a scale on the neck, from the open strings to the 12th fret, for the tuning you play. Start the drone and play the scale over a steady low note.

Show a scale

1. Tap the Practice tab, then the Scales card. The tabs stay at the bottom; the arrow at the top left, or a tap on Practice, leads back to the cards.
2. Tap the scale's name and pick a Root and a Scale, for example A and Minor pentatonic.
3. The neck shows every note of it as a dot with its name. The root's dots are filled in colour.
4. Tap ▶ beside the name to start the drone, and play along.

Held upright, the neck stands up like the chord charts: the nut at the top, the thickest string on the left, the fret numbers 3, 5, 7, 9 and 12 beside it. Turn the phone on its side and the neck lies down, the thickest string at the bottom, as you look down at your guitar.

The fourteen scales

Major and Minor; Major pentatonic and Minor pentatonic; Blues and Major blues; the modes Dorian, Mixolydian, Lydian, Phrygian and Locrian; Phrygian dominant; Harmonic minor and Melodic minor.

A mode's colour note, the one that gives it its sound, has a ring in the accent colour: Dorian's 6th, Phrygian's ♭2, Lydian's ♯4, Mixolydian's ♭7, Locrian's ♭5 and harmonic minor's raised 7th. D Dorian has the same notes as C major, but its ring shows you the B to lean on.

The drone

A drone is a steady note under your playing: the scale's root, alone or with its fifth. Playing over it, you hear each note of the scale against the root, which trains your ear and your intonation. It is how Indian classical music is practised, over a tanpura.

• ▶ and ■ start and stop it. A new root is followed at once, while it sounds.
• The button with the sound's icon and ⌄ opens the drone's choices: the Sound, Tanpura (the first), Harmonium, Flute organ or Warm pad; the Notes, Root, + fifth (the first) or + fifth and octave; and Lower, which puts the whole drone an octave down.
• While it sounds, the root's dots on the neck glow softly, and the screen stays on.
• The flute organ, the warm pad and Lower are deep and soft: a phone's own speaker barely plays them. Use headphones or a speaker for those.
• Other apps' music pauses while the drone sounds and comes back after. The drone stops when you leave Scales, the app, or turn the screen off.

Good to know

• The root is shared with Chords: pick A minor pentatonic here and Chords opens on A.
• Settings → Left-handed flips the neck. See Left-handed.
• The drone follows your reference pitch (Settings → Reference pitch (A4)), like the tuner.
• On the 5-string banjo the short string is drawn the whole length, but faded below the 5th fret, where it starts, with no notes there. Its open note sits just before its start, by the 5th fret, and frets on it are counted on the neck, as banjo tab does: in G major its a is at the 7th fret.
• With TalkBack, the neck is read string by string, from the thickest: E 2 string, open E, fret 3 G, fret 5 A, root. The banjo's fifth is the short G 4 string: short G 4 string, open G, root, fret 7 A.

For the curious: how the drone is made

Nothing is a recording or a loop, so there is no seam to hear, however long it plays. Each tone in the drone is made as it sounds, at its exact pitch: the fifth exactly 3:2 of the root, the octave exactly 2:1. So the drone itself never wavers; any slow wobble you hear is your note against it, a sign to adjust your finger.

The tanpura plucks its four strings one after another, every one and a half seconds, each pluck made afresh with the buzz of the instrument's flat bridge, so no two cycles are alike. The harmonium has two reeds per note a few cents apart and a breathing bellows; the flute organ is a closed pipe, nearly pure; the warm pad is five slightly detuned voices through a filter that slowly opens and closes. Twangle's tests play it for ten minutes and find the same level and pitch at the end.