Several years ago, I found a way of organizing the various shapes needed to play a scale across the fretboard down into just one pattern. Since that time, this way of thinking has become part of how I approach the fretboard all the time and it has helped me to reduce the number of things I have to think about while playing.
Being a guitar teacher, I’ve taught this idea to many of my students, some of which have asked if I could create a more visual way of teaching the concept. This led me to create the following video lesson. It applies the concept to the Minor Pentatonic scale, however, you can do the same thing with just about any scale.
Let me know what you think:
Please keep in mind that this approach is just one way of organizing the scale shapes on the fretboard; there are certainly many other ways of doing this. This just happens to be the way that makes sense to me and, as a bonus, also lets me reduce the number of scale shapes that I have to keep track of.
If it works for you - awesome! Please use it to help you open up the fretboard, as it did for me. If it doesn’t work for you, then I hope you find an approach that does.
Cheers!
P.S. If you found the pace of the video to be a little quick, I’ve also created an written version of the lesson which you can read through here.
P.P.S. This was the first time I’d ever created an animated video like this. It took about 90 hours of work to finish and I now have a even more respect for what Troy has gone through to give us the CTC series.