Employing scalar QCD we study the gluon emission of heavy quarks created by the interaction with light quarks. We develop approximation formulas for the high energy limit and study when the full calculation reaches this high energy limit. For zero quark masses and in the high energy limit our model reproduces the Gunion-Bertsch results. We justify why scalar QCD represents a good approximation to the full QCD approach for the energy loss of heavy quarks. In the regime of accessible phenomenology we observe that the emission at small transverse momentum (dead cone effect) is less suppressed than originally suggested. We also investigate the influence of a finite gluon mass on the discussed results.