Jambole.com – for Guitarists

Fretboard Patterns are a great way of creating some amazing sounding licks. This is a huge subject and well worth taking time to explore and incorporate into your playing. If you’ve ever used string skipping licks, for example, you’re probably using an application of Fretboard Patterns.

Lets start by drawing out some extended arpeggios and pentatonics.

Extended Triads (3 notes per octave)

Extended 7ths (4 notes per octave)

Extended 9ths and pentatonics (5 notes per string)

Ok, there are a lot of different arpeggios so I could go on all day, but they’re the main set to start with.

Getting Started

Let’s find a simple scale based Lick, for example…

As you can see, this is a very simple 12 note run, which just cycles around over and over. So with a bit of practice, I’d expect to be able to achieve some reasonable speed with it.

OK, lets analyse what the left hand is doing. It’s playing a pattern which contains 3 notes on 1 string, 3 notes on another string and 1 note on a third string.

Now I can take that Fretboard Pattern and move it to another part of the Major Scale. How about the string below?

That was easy!

By the way, one of the reasons most of my scale charts use 3 notes per string is so that you can move Fretboard Patterns around the neck like this.

Lets apply it to the Pentatonic shape above.

So I look at the layout of the Pentatonic and find an area where I can reach two strings with 3 note on them and then 1 note on it’s own. Well if I stay high up on the neck, there are plenty of places that I can do this.

Just as a personal preference I’m going to miss a string between the first 3 note string and the second one, This is because I don’t want the repeated note that you’d get if you used 2 strings that were next to each other.

So lets test it out.

That’s a nice wide sounding lick, and not too much harder to play than the scale based one!

Lets move it and see if it still works.

Still pretty good to me!

Next Steps

There are a good few ways of developing this idea.

• Use Melodic Fragments to vary the run. There is no rule that says you have to just go up and down the scale, after all.
• Try other Arpeggios, and try cycling the same pattern through several arpeggios.
• Come up with new note clusters. We’re using a 3-3-1 pattern here, How about trying a  2-2-1 pattern – it’s a lot easier on the fingers, when you’re using Triads and 7ths.

There’s a lot of material to explore here. Maybe I’ll cover some more in a future article.

Have Fun