Exploiting Shapes: The Major Scale

Hey Dudes and Dudettes! Welcome to another installment of my 'exploiting shapes' series. The major scale will be the focus of this tutorial. Following the same direction as all of the previous lessons in this series, we will be taking the initial shape, in this instance the first six notes of each position, and we will be shifting them over 3 octaves. I try to practice these in the same way that I practice my scale positions and I find that doing that can really help when I improvise as it can be all to easy to fall into the trap of playing scalar runs as opposed to coherent vocal like phrases. I'm not saying that playing these shapes will give you that facility but it may well help you to break out of the scale position trap. OK, let's learn those shapes! Here we have the first six notes of a Gmajor scale taken from the first position on the 6th and 5th strings: G, A, B, C, D, E which are then repeated on the 4th and 3rd and 2nd and 1st strings.