If you suffer from weak scale knowledge for composing and soloing, or perhaps if you are poor when it comes to note recognition on the neck, or maybe you cannot clearly understand the boundaries of fret-board regions for scales on the neck, whatever the reason for your unfortunate use of 'wrong' notes, you are definitely going to want to watch this video... 




I’m going to show you a two part exercise that you can do anywhere on the neck, every single day, that won’t take you very long to do and will help you to get rid of poor scale and note knowledge forever.

WATCH THE VIDEO:




THE EXERCISE:
Understanding the structure of this exercise will require a brief discussion of the use of unison notes. The exercise operates by working around a 2-string scale layout across approx. 5 frets. It is based upon mapping out the location of unison tones within the two strings across the designated fret-range..

The exercise is focused on helping you better remember how to lock down all the diatonic notes within a specific playing region of the neck. And, when you do this, (from within these regions), you’ll start to have a much clearer understanding for how to be able to better compose or to solo in a chosen area of the neck.

A lot of guitar players, are quite likely doing something similar to this already.

However, having a system that you can put into a daily practice routine should be able to go much further toward helping you understand the notes within specific regions.

This system will definitely help players focus more and that focus will help players get away from hitting embarrassing notes. Those are the notes that you’d wish you never hit, and we don’t want that… so, we’re going to do our best with this exercise to change that!





PRACTICE:
Step 1). Establishing a Region

When it comes to practicing this exercise, the first thing that you’ll need to do with this  system is select a region on the neck for the group of notes that you’ll want to practice (within that region).

Of course, if you already have a lead part, or a solo that you’re in the process of studying, then you could certainly use that key for this exercise.

For our example though, we’ll simply use the key of, “C.”

When studying this approach, I like to start my students up higher on the guitar neck, (since that’s where most soloing and lead playing tends to occur).

The area that we’ll start within will be 10th fret to 15th fret.

Here’s how this part of the exercise works...

There are three phases:


PHASE ONE: Strings 1 and 2:
Range from 10th to 15th



PHASE TWO: Strings 3 and 4:
Range from 10th to 15th



PHASE THREE: Strings 5 and 6:
Range from 10th to 15th






APPLICATION:
Step 2). Phrase Building Exercise
Once you’ve organized the notes from the key that you’ve established, and you’ve gone ahead and based those notes across two strings, (using a span of at least three to four frets or sometimes five), then at that point you’ve successfully completed the first stage of this exercise.

The next part of this study will focus on getting more creative with the notes of the chosen region by learning how to melodically combine groups of three or more strings together and work toward a better awareness for the choices of notes that are available in the area.

Our goal will be to combine phrases so that each melodic idea will use the unison tones that are involved within the fret span.

This is excellent work and when you get into trying this you’ll start learning the framework of the region and that will help you with learning the boundaries of the fret-board a lot better so that you become a lot more clear on the exact locations of all the notes.

Let’s play through some examples of melodic phrases that I’ve created, so that you can start to better understand how to do this yourself at home…

Melodic Examples:

Example 1). 


Example 2). 



Example 3).







CONCLUSION:
The ways that you can combine string sets and note patterns is pretty much limitless. 

There are dozens and dozens of different combinations that you can come up with, so it shouldn’t be much of an issue to move ahead with some really solid daily practice on this topic.

Once you’ve done a few keys up in the high register, move into the central area of the neck, and then eventually do some work down in the lower neck region as well.