[shostack]

As someone learning to play guitar this is the hardest part for me. The scales are boring and I want to jump to the fun stuff or learning a song. But then learning that song is a similar process. I have coworkers who are skilled guitarists and it is frustrating to watch them because I know they've put in the hours of doing scales.

It is hard to stay motivated when the "wrong audience" is yourself.

[ThomPete]

Then don't.

There are many ways to learn to play music. If you just want to learn to play songs then do that. Don't worry about the scales.

Instead of learning scales start jamming with some background music. Start to transcribe some solo you like (don't use tabs) and learn to play that way.

If you aren't motivated by playing scales then you shouldn't do it.

Make sure that it's always about enjoying music first, then about learning theory or technique.

One of my favorite ways to learn scales was to do patterns in the scales over some chord progression. That ways I was playing little patterned melodies while learning to play the scales.

Also don't confuse learning scales with learning to pick. Most of the times when you hear someone learning scales just going up and down the strings they are really practicing picking technique which is many times harder than to learn the actual scales.

[shostack]

That's pretty much how I've been doing it TBH. My mother passed down her old Martin classical guitar and so I've been learning some basic folk fingerstyle patterns which is fun because it gets the finger work in while sounding nice (or will sound nice once I get my speed up).

The most frustrating part is I used to be a section leader when I played clarinet in HS and could borderline sight read at that point. I've forgotten pretty much all my musical knowledge since then (including how to read sheet music), so it has been horribly frustrating to have shadows of memories for how fluent I used to be in this stuff and to have to start from scratch again. That probably makes me much less patient than I normally would be.

[neverminder]

Don't be afraid to defy conventional means. When as a kid I (forced by my parents) was learning violin and later piano - I'd throw away the notes and learn to play a piece by ear in a fraction of time. This year I picked up a Taylor and I'm learning fingerstyle. I don't do any boring mechanical practice, I only play songs that I like - it took a while, but watching youtube video note by note I managed to glue together Beatles "Yesterday" and now it actually sounds good.

[ThomPete]

Exactly. Scales are great if you want to learn to improvise and understand how to play in Dorian or Mixolydian etc, but even for that it's not actually necessary.

Your ear is the only thing thats really needed.

[sotojuan]

This happens to me a lot with programming, where the (maybe poor) analogy is scales being "fundamentals" and songs being "cool apps/libraries". I tend to skip to building cool apps and when the easy parts are done I get lost or the projects becomes a mess.