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Why And How To Use These Shapes
So why should we use these shapes. I'm sure from playing them a few times you may have found them hard to play. There is certainly alot of left hand finger stretching involved as well as left hand positioning shifts. So why bother use them?
These scale shapes were made with 3 notes on every string for a reason. That reason is because now your scale shape is symmetrical. You can take any pattern and apply it to any string or sequence it through the entire scale with ease and simplicity. Take a look at the following, it is a tab file of the first 3 note per string scale shape found in Part I, this time in the key of A.
If you played this through it will just sound like your playing a simple little scale. What can be done with this scale to make it more exciting is make patterns and sequence it through the shape. For example.
The above is the same exact scale. But we have sequenced it with a simple pattern. Because the scale shape is symmetrical, it is easy to apply the same pattern to any string. Notice at the top of the tab reads 'Pattern: 123'. Since every string has 3 notes, we can tag each note with a number. With a pattern of 123, we would play the first note on the string, then the second note, finally the third. That same pattern is used for every string. Its up to you how many times to repeat the same pattern on the same string. In the above example it was repeated twice on each string.
Here is another example.
This pattern uses two strings. 123 on the first string, then 1 on the second string, finally 32 back on the first string. In terms of pitch the pattern is a simple scale, going up to the 4th note and coming back down to the 2nd. The pattern is then sequenced on the next string set. In the tab, the pattern was not repeated before moving to the next string set(like what was done in the first example). You can add these repeats yourself as you wish.
Another example:
This pattern is much longer. But the simplicity of it is clear.
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