I’m at the point in my guitar learning where I feel that I should be learning (and using) scales - or at least, going beyond simply strumming chords to accompany a song. The problem is that I can play the basic (major and pentatonic) scales fairly OK - not perfectly, but reasonably consistently and at a sensible speed. This is a “problem”, because I’m finding that I don’t have much motivation to keep practising. Getting a few more bpm, or a bit better accuracy, doesn’t really get me wanting to pick up the guitar.
I think the main issue is that I don’t know how to use the scales I’m learning for anything useful. Simply playing them up and down isn’t giving me a huge sense of how they’d be useful in the sort of playing I like to do, which is acoustic styles like folk and ballads (with a bit of acoustic rock, like “Wish you were here” thrown in…).
So I guess what I’m asking is what do people do in order to make “technique” stuff like this come to life? I’m basically learning solo (I play in a church group but that’s very much just simple strumming) and some of the later grade 3 stuff on the site looks interesting, but I’m worried that if I start leaping too far ahead without consolidating the basics, I’ll end up struggling and demotivating myself even more.