u/AggressiveTwo8385

I’ve been working on identifying intervals and practicing hearing the 1st, 3rd, 4th, and 5th from a specific key. I understand that scale degrees are essentially just intervals from the tonic note.

I’m trying to understand where I should spend my time. I’m a guitar player and my goal is to be able to improvise over backing tracks - aka hear a note in my head and be able to play it on the board without hunting.

My question is - do I need to be able to recognize chord changes and identify those chords in order to utilize scale degrees? If I’m in the C major key I can identify 3rd 4th and 5th. What happens if the chord is G Major (a chord within C major) instead of C major itself? Am I still comparing the note relative to the tonic of the key which is C, or at that point should I be thinking of the note in relation to G?

The chipotle by me keeps getting my orders wrong, but they are like minor mistakes I don’t really care about (missing a side, wrong meat once, missing a topping etc). The chipotle I go to is so understaffed and constantly packed so I don’t care enough to report if it’s going to ding an employee. Like it’s such a shit show in there I don’t blame them for missing stuff all the time. But if it doesn’t hurt them, I’ll def report so I get the replacement/refunds lol