Please, a little help guitarist to guitarist

[Happyorange27]

You got an A on your essay ^. 

[Heady Jam Fan]

Lol - I can be unintentionally long winded and Fridays are slow at work!

I had a few ideas and they seemed to integrate with each other, I hope I made sense, but I think it is something that helps me tie the harmonic and melodic aspects together.

[IamWILSON]

I have subscribed to that kind of theory about a year ago that Heady was talking about.  I do not approach any of it as far as viewing the scales though, as it really helps to do this stuff by just concentrating on maj, min, dim, and aug triads and how they work across 2-string and 3-string sets.  And you MUST know your fretboard really well!  But it pays off as it becomes easy to always play a melodic line based off the chord tones of the harmony being played, as well as being able to impose a different triad over the chord being playing that allows you to play in the upper structure or extensions of the harmony and also play some altered tones for the desired dissonance and consonance that is tension and release.

[Heady Jam Fan]

This reminds me of a brief lecture I went to related to writing melodic lines. The instructor focused on Beatles melodies and suggested a theory for duplicating the process. While it is unlikely the Beatles thought this way, it is helpful for those who don't whistle a hook to a new top-5 every morning. It just involves writing out each note to the chord progression and connecting a note from the first chord to the second and so on with the least number of steps between the notes possible. A little off the topic of the thread, but seems related to the direction it took. I don't practice this, it seems quite contrived, but maybe I would write better melodies if I gave it some thought.

PS - along with playing scales diagonally, like across a few strings, I think learning how they fit together is really helpful - like I mentioned going from a minor pentatonic to one a fifth above could be an example. But even more so would be the same idea as the CAGED system - learning all the shapes of the scales (pentatonic included) up and down the neck, how one fits with the next, the practicing switching from one shape to the next on different strings - I found that pretty quickly lets you get from one end to the next.