Practicing the Major Scale in 3rds

trevjo7

Dear All,

Would anyone be able to help clarify the following for me. I picked this up Justin's invaluable guitar tuition website but could not really understand it:

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Stage 4. Play in 3rd's

As you may know, chords are built up in intervals of a 3rd. This means that by playing notes that are a 3rd apart they will tend to sound good together. Often melodies use chord tones, so after some time practicing this pattern, your improvising should start sounding more melodic. You can think of 3rds as playing a note, then missing the next scale step and playing the next. Then go back to the note you missed, and go up a third again (skip a note...). This is a great exercise and I would highly recommend spending a good amount of time on this exercise and getting it really solid, so that it will come out naturally, without you having to think about it.

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Thanks to all those in advance that can help me out with the above.

Trevor

Danny1969

I think he means take something like take the note C in the key of C and then make your next note E, than G etc then maybe play something like C - E - D -G 

C - D - E - F - G - A - B -C 

With the above C is the root note, D is the 2nd, E is the Third note etc in terms of distance apart. A is a third up from F etc

If you played this 

C - D - E

And I played 

E - F - G 

I would be harmonizing with you in thirds, like Thin Lizzy or Iron Maiden etc

ArchtopDave

I think it is more likely that Justin means play the following ; 

 C Major. : play C E / D F / E G / F A / G B / A C / B D /

Also you could do arpeggios as follows C E G / D F A / E G B / F A C / G B D / A C E / B D F/

 

The descending opening line in The Doors "Riders On The Storm:" is a nice run down in thirds.

octatonic

ArchtopDave said:

I think it is more likely that Justin means play the following ; C Major. : play C E / D F/ E G / F A / G B / A C / B D /

Yes this- but play them all over the neck, in all keys- work through the circle of 5ths.

You should play the major scale (and relative minor, harmonic and melodic minor too) in 3rd's, 4th's, 5th's, 6th's and 7ths too.

I strongly suggest you sing the intervals when you play them too.

Speed is NOT the primary goal with these, at least not initially.

This is standard syllabus for all the music schools (GIT, ICMP, Guitars X, ACM, Bimm etc).

trevjo7

Thanks for your advice. There's a lot of work for me to do.
Trev

nickp

trevjo7 said:

Thanks for your advice. There's a lot of work for me to do.
Trev

yes - i have done it with the pentatonic scale - takes a long time with a metronome but it will completely ingrain the scale, improve the accuracy of your picking and also get you doing sequences a la bonamassa et al.  not just thirds but try sequenced patterns of 3, 4, 5, 6.  The other trick when picking these against a metronome is get in the habit of emphasising the note on the beat slightly so that becomes habit also.

do triplets practice as well with it.

must have done this daily for about 6months or more but it has improved my picking immesurably

speed as Octatonic says isn't the primary motive, but iirc 100bpm accurate and fluent is sort of grade 8 ish (not that it matters) but if you think that lots of music is in the 100-125 bpm range then four notes per beat at that speed is a sort of target - (I am still working on this aspect)