I find solfege (the "flying Do scale") to be very useful for singing, not so much for playing guitar or other instruments. That's probably because of how I learned music as a child. I went to a Mennonite school for the first four years, and all music was vocal only (a capella). All our song books were printed with shaped notes. (the Aiken system - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shape_note)fretski wrote:THANKS, part of what you say is what I'm interested in because I can DOodle the flying Do major scale (if that's what it's going to be called). I'm even thinking of learning to do it in terms of 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 which would seem even more useful if I can teach myself. Your use of a chord to guide scales is something I never heard of (or thought of because it's over my head at this point) but it is interesting too.
The benefit of this system is that it forces you to think of everything in intervals. This is especially useful if you are sight-reading music, particularly when multiple vocal harmonies are involved. When singing a note, unless you are gifted with perfect pitch (pitch recognition), there is nothing absolute to relate a note's letter name (C, F, G, etc.) to the sound produced - you need to mentally calculate the relationship your assigned letter note has to the other notes being sung, figure out what it should sound like, then sing it. With shaped notes, all that work is done for you, so sight reading a capella music becomes much easier. It is directly obvious how the note I am singing relates to the key I am in, as well as how it relates to the other notes being sung.
For playing any musical instrument, the benefits quickly disappear, as the way to produce each note is defined by its letter name. To play a C on a piano, you hit the "C" key.
The 'numbering' system is useful for naming chords, particularly if you are playing in a band with instruments tuned to various keys, or a country/bluegrass band where capos might be at different places on some of the instruments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_number_system