[gravitas]

Ah, I see. And I agree with you, for the most part. I can see the value of scales as practice for the fingers. Sounding awful if you miss, yeah, that can be a problem too- though, there's a dude named Steve Piticco, mad flatpicker who was friends with my guitar teacher, who implements bends to avoid that kind of thing. But you have to have a really good ear for that, and it's still the same kind of up-and-down country stuff that you don't like.

The scale system is a bit flawed, and definitely slow going if you're approaching it in terms of patterns and numbers. But that's no reason to rope off an entire reach of the guitar, especially if it leads to helping you envision your fretboard.

I suppose that there is a sort of release in playing a million miles an hour, like you're blazing through the skids of the world. And it's fine; those are the selfish guitar players. The ones who play for their own releases than for our enjoyment. In some ways I envy them. But they're also the players that think with their hands and not with their heads.

The true artists hear their own melodies in the back of their heads, guys like Mozart, Sun Ra, Coltrane, Bruce Cockburn, Sting, Robbie Robertson, Lennon and Mccartney. If you think in terms of creating your own preconceived melody, knowing scales is only going to make it easier to translate them to music. Not knowing them seems to me more like a shot in the dark that might lead you to something other than what you were imagining.

I don't know, am I full of myself? Cause if I am, someone shoot me down, I'd greatly appreciate it.