Stop 6 of 6
Connecting positions and guide tones
Travelling the neck horizontally and diagonally following thirds and sevenths.
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Stop 6 of 6
Travelling the neck horizontally and diagonally following thirds and sevenths.
You have five positions, arpeggios in each one and voicings that link smoothly. But a good guitarist doesn't stay locked in one room of the labyrinth: they move. In this stop you learn to travel the neck in all three directions — vertical, horizontal and diagonal — and to follow a thread that guides you through any progression: the , the thirds and sevenths of each chord.
Picture the neck as a map. You can travel it in three ways:
Play the whole C major scale on the third string, from fret 5 to 17. Watch the gaps: two frets for a whole step, one for a half step. This is the ladder of whole and half steps you learnt in Sound Valley, drawn on the neck.
Playing horizontally has real advantages: the tone is even, slides are natural and you see intervals as distances. Many blues and slide players think this way. The drawback is speed: every note forces the hand to move.
You already know this mode: CAGED positions and three notes per string. The hand stays still and the fingers do the work.
String 6, Fret 7: B2 · 7 · Seventh
The risk of the vertical mode is getting stuck: always playing in the same box, with the same phrases, until every solo sounds alike. The answer is not to abandon positions, but to learn to leave them.
A diagonal joins neighbouring positions. The practical rule: play two or three notes on one string and, with a slide, let the hand move up as you cross to the next string. Here is C major from the low C on the fifth string to the high C on the second, two octaves through four positions:
String 5, Fret 3: C3 · 1 · Root
Each slide (D → E, A → B, F → G) is a door: the hand enters the next position without any audible gap. Do them with the ring finger, so that the index lands naturally on the next note.
The slide is not the only way to shift position. Keep these three at hand:
Listen to a shared-note shift: the phrase climbs in 5th position (index on fret 5) and carries on in 7th. The A on fret 7 of the fourth string is played first with the ring finger and, when it repeats, with the index, which leaves the hand in the new position:
Now the thread that leads you out of the labyrinth. In every seventh chord two notes say almost everything: the 3 (major or minor?) and the 7 (maj7, 7 or m7?). They are the guide tones. Listen to them alone over a ii–V–I, with no roots:
With only two notes per chord, the progression is perfectly clear. And notice how little they move: C drops to B, F stays and then drops to E. On the neck they all fall on two strings and three frets:
String 3, Fret 5: C4 · ♭7 · Seventh
String 3, Fret 4: B3 · 3 · Third
String 3, Fret 4: B3 · 7 · Seventh
Let's try a longer progression: the harmonised scale travelled in fourths, Cmaj7 – Fmaj7 – Bm7♭5 – Em7 – Am7 – Dm7 – G7 – Cmaj7. Following the guide tones you get two lines walking down like a staircase:
Look at the tab: the two voices move diagonally down the neck, from fret 12 to fret 4. It is the diagonal from before, now serving the harmony. Each note stays for a bar and then drops a half or whole step: in its purest form.
When the root moves up a fourth, the seventh of the first chord is a half or whole step from the third of the second. That is why, in motion by fourths (the heart of jazz and much of pop), guide tones always form descending lines. On top of that, the 3rd and 7th of a dominant chord form a tritone, and when that tritone resolves to the tonic chord each voice moves a half step: the tension unwinds by the shortest route.
Goal: Play the whole cycle with guide tones, without stopping and in time, at 80 BPM.
Goal: Improvise four times through the cycle, landing on a guide tone on beat 1 of every bar.
Play the diagonal route from the previous scene and then bring it back down in reverse, sliding down with the index. Then invent your own diagonal that starts on the C of the sixth string (fret 8) and ends on the C at fret 20 of the first string, or the highest one you can reach comfortably.
Goal: Play the C major diagonal route up and down without gaps at 70 BPM.
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