Getting Started on Single-Note Runs

The examples are constructed carefully so you ought to make an effort to digest them equally carefully. If you play blindly through each run your knowledge will end up fractured and incoherent. Optimal progress is possible only if you exercise your brain as well as your fingers.

Soloing over chord progressions requires not only that you know which notes fits which chords but also that you know what the next chord is going to sound like. If you are playing over a blues you can probably fake your way through even if you don't understand what you are doing because you have heard the chord sequence hundreds of times. Faking your way through Giant Steps, where the chords descend in major thirds, is a very different matter. Ear training is important so listen carefully to the chords, and in particular make yourself familiar with parallel chords (a major chord paired with the minor three semitones below). Often the single-note run will sound strange on its own so you need the accompaniment to make sense of it.

For each of the three scales, pentatonic, hexatonic, and pentadominant, the examples are divided into seven groups, numbered from zero to six, depending on the movement of the root note (the groups ht1-ht6 and pd1-pd6 are not created yet). Each group contains 24 examples, two in each of the twelve keys. I have recorded all examples with a click track and a piano accompaniment that plays the chords on the first beat of every bar. The piano accompaniment is in the left channel, the guitar is in the right channel, and the click track is in the center. The recordings are encoded in high-quality mp3 format (192kb/s). The tablature is available in png, pdf, gp5, and gp6. The format gp5 is read by the free programs TefView and Tux Guitar, and gp6 is read by the commercial package Guitar Pro 6.

What to pay attention to

Notation

All single-note runs are provided with three types of tablature: 1) clock notation, 2) tablature for a 7-string guitar, and 3) tablature for a 6-string guitar. You can think of the clock notation as being tablature for a guitar with four strings, all tuned to Ab. Below it is shown how a chromatic run from the open E on the lowest string to the E in 12th fret on the M3-7 (or the C6) maps out in each of the three systems. I have turned my back on traditional music notation a long time ago but if for some reason you can't live without it, you can import the examples into one of the tablature editors listed above and enable the standard notation.


The colour coding is used to draw your attention to the fact that there are effectively only three different strings on the M3: E, Ab and C. You get from the fret number to the clock notation in the following way.

You have to get used to "wrapping around noon" as you do in real life. For example 4 hours before 3 is 11 and 4 hours after 9 is 1.