Cool 2nps Pentatonic ascending 4s pattern I was playing with last night

I’m trying to remember what exactly was the rabbit hole I followed to get here, but I think I was doing some 2nps pentatonic stuff last night to try to get a little more comfortable with escaped downstrokes (I tend towards escaped upstrokes by default), and then thought it might be kinda cool to take that chunk and ascend it up the neck and back down as a fretting-hand dexterity exercise. While doing that, it struck me that if you took that motif, and bounced back and forth between two positions, you could actually string together a fairly efficient ascending 4 pattern without skipping any notes while maintaining a single-escape motion.

Not my fastest playing, again this started life as a fretting hand dexterity drill and it’s exposing some weaknesses I think… But, in theory, with practic, this basic motif should be something that you can burn through pretty quickly, so I thought I’d share:

Don’t mind the QuaranBeard, or the early morning lack of coffee, haha.

Tab:

|-----------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------|
|-------------------------------------3-5-|
|---------------------3-5-----5-8-3-5-----|
|-----3-5-----5-8-3-5-----5-8-------------|
|-3-6-----6-8-----------------------------|

|-----------------------------3-6-----6-8-|
|-------------3-6-----6-8-3-6-----6-8-----|
|-----5-7-3-5-----5-7---------------------|
|-5-8-------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------|

|------8-10-------10-13-------13-15-------15-18-/20~-|
|-8-11------11-13-------13-15-------15-18------------|
|----------------------------------------------------|
|----------------------------------------------------|
|----------------------------------------------------|
|----------------------------------------------------|

It’s a cool motif, and the approach of jumping back and forth between positions can allow you to move this around pretty freely. And, IMO, this is one of the cool things about the CtC framework - it can kind of become a creative tool, where if you take some of the constraints a articular pickstroke comes with and work around those, it can encourage you to think in ways you might not normally.

I’m doing this with escaped downstrokes by starting with an upstroke, which frankly feels kinda weird, but probably means that’s something I should practice more. Definitely lends itself well to escaped upstrokes, though.

6 Likes

This is great thanks for sharing! My left hand gets a bit confused switching between the different pentatonic positions (as soon as one goes away from the “box” the shapes get a bit awkward).

But it’s probably worth working on it since the picking hand part is super efficient!

2 Likes

Looks like a cool way to memorize 3nps pentatonic boxes.

Yeah, this started off as more of a fretting-hand exercise for me, and as nothing about the fretting hand side of this really SHOULD be particularly challenging, I think the initial awkwardness is mostly lack of familiarity due to any real issues, provided you put some thought into your fingering choices (for example, the first two groups, doing that pointer-pinkie-pointer-ring, and then a two position shift to middle-pinkie-pointer-pinkie, actually is fairly straightforward - really, just stock finger-per-fret stuff).

The harder part, like any strict motif-based pattern like this, is finding ways to make it musically interesting…