Morning Meditation - Indian drone guitar practice routine with digital tanpura - (modal workout) (Patreon)

After seeing Johan’s post over on our discourse forum where he was asking about drone apps to practice scales over, I was reminded of this video I uploaded some time ago.

The digital tanpura machine I’m using here was purchased when I was over in India.. it sounds great and is very inspiring, but sadly it has a tendency to electrocute me everytime I touch it! 🤪

Nowadays to get my drone fix, (free from injury), I like to use the Electroharmonix “Freeze” pedal which I highly recommend.

Now, you might be asking: “But why use a drone for scale practice?.. what’s the point?”. Well, with a drone, you can set it to create a wash of sound that omits or includes particular intervals, therefore not locking you down to a specific tonality. In the example above I’m using a drone that only contains the Root and Fifth of a chord, therefore allowing me to drift freely between different scales/modes rather than setting a rigid tonality for me to stick to. So you could play around with the mixolydian where you’re using a flatter 7th, and the next moment switch the a natural 7th and imply a modal shift to Ionian. I’m bringing in a lot of Lydian sounds in that video, using the #IV interval as a kind of tension note, before resolving to Ionian or Mixolydian.

Also, because there is no third in the drone, you can even switch between major and minor tonalities as and when you choose.

It’s a hard thing to describe in writing, so I’ll do a video about it soon to help shed more light on it.

In short; Drones = creative freedom for practicing scales!