Playing Melodically on One String (Part 1)

This is a video version of an earlier PDF lesson, which is available above.

Playing horizontally along one string is one of the most neglected areas of fretboard mastery. Practicing this will make your playing more melodic and help you move freely around the fretboard. In this lesson, I’ll give you some ideas for practicing effectively by leveraging melodic sequences within the major scale modes.

Playing melodically on one string (part 1)

One of the most neglected areas of fretboard mastery is playing horizontally along one string. Practicing this will make your playing more melodic and help you move freely around the fretboard. In this lesson, I’ll give you some ideas for practicing effectively by leveraging melodic sequences. In part 2, I’ll share some ways to move seamlessly between the pentatonic scale and the major scale modes.

The major scale on one string

The major scale is a fixed sequence of whole-step (two-fret) and half-step (one-fret) intervals (W - W - H - W - W - W - H) that repeat in each octave. Since each major scale mode essentially starts the sequence at a different point in the cycle, once you’ve learned the sequence of intervals for one, you’ve learned them all.

One of the most effective ways to learn the sequence of intervals is to get familiar with the three-note sequences that start on each scale degree and how they relate.

There appear to be three different three-note patterns, but if you include the spacing between patterns (and you should!), there are four.

This small difference between the 4th pattern and the 1st and 5th matters more when changing strings using the 3NPS system than it will in this lesson, but it is worth keeping in mind. It is highly worth memorizing which shape corresponds to each scale degree. In this system, the pattern number corresponds to the scale degree of its lowest note.

Shifting positions

You can use these exercises to practice various techniques (e.g., alternate picking, legato, speed). However, your primary goal is to train your brain and fingers to change positions smoothly within the scale while keeping track of the scale degree under your index finger.

There are six shifts worth practicing: shifting up by one, two, or three scale degrees and shifting down by one, two, or three scale degrees. You could practice larger shifts than that, but there are other techniques for moving larger distances. I will cover some of those in a future lesson.

We will use the C major scale played on the B string for the examples in this lesson. Once you understand the principles, you should practice this on the other strings and in other keys.

First, practice shifting one position upward. I encourage you to use the full usable length of your fretboard for these exercises. I will limit the examples to a 17-fret range, which most guitars can accommodate.

I’ll detail this first example to ensure you understand how I will describe future exercises. After this one, the descriptions will be more compact.

Start at the first fret and play the notes of sequence 1 from low to high (frets 1, 3, and 5). This can be a big stretch but try to keep your index finger positioned over the first fret as best you can. We want to reinforce the relationship between the first scale degree of the pattern and the pattern’s shape.

Next, shift your index finger to the third fret. You have shifted up one position, so you will play sequence 2 here:

Shift up another note in the sequence. Your index finger is now at the fifth fret, where you will play sequence 3:

Since the second note is on the 6th fret, you shift only one fret to play sequence 4:

This is a good time to remind yourself that the only scale degrees separated by one fret are 3/4 and 7/1. When shifting up, this is obvious from the patterns themselves, but you will need to remember this later when shifting down.

If you were to continue this pattern up the fretboard in triplets, you would get:

At this stage, it is unnecessary to play this at any particular tempo or even play it in time. For now, take as much time as you need to move between positions and play the notes clearly while always focusing on which scale degree is under your index finger.

Next, practice shifting one position downward after playing each group. As before, play each pattern as a sequence of three notes from low to high. This will reinforce your focus on the scale degree under your index finger.

When descending, don’t forget that your index finger always moves down by two frets unless it’s moving from scale degree 1 to 7 or from 4 to 3.

It bears repeating that as you play these, focus on the lowest note of each grouping and maintain awareness of the scale degree of that note and the shape of the three-note pattern that goes with it. Those are the most important things to be burning into your memory.

Once you can play these without referring to a diagram or TAB, you should begin playing along with a metronome. Start at a slow tempo and ensure that your position shifts stay in time. The notes should flow smoothly, and a listener should not be able to hear when you change positions.

Larger shifts

Next, practice shifts of three scale degrees in each direction. When you do this, pairs of adjacent positions will not share any notes. When ascending, your index finger will move up five frets between positions unless moving from sequence 4 to sequence 6, which is a 6-fret jump.

As you move up the neck, you’ll play through a portion of the repeating cycle of positions 1 - 4 - 7 - 3 - 6 - 2 - 5. This is the same cycle of patterns and shapes presented in my three-notes-per-string (3NPS) video. In that video, the sequence was displayed as 7 - 3 - 6 - 2 - 5 - 1 - 4, which is exactly the same but starts on a different scale degree.

If you descend the scale with shifts of three scale degrees, the sequence is 1 - 5 - 2 - 6 - 3 - 7 - 4. The video displayed it as 4 - 1 - 5 - 2 - 6 - 3 - 7.

These repeating scale-degree sequences are worth memorizing in both directions since they work here to shift by threes along one string and in the 3NPS system to move from one string to another. Indeed, if you already know the repeating 3NPS pattern, it may be helpful to visualize it when you are shifting by threes.

It is worth noting that these sequences count by threes and wrap around back to the start whenever passing 7. As you ascend from one position to the next, add three to the index-finger scale degree, and if you ever get a number greater than seven, subtract seven from it.

As an aside that you can safely ignore, we can express this mathematically as:

To descend, subtract three; add seven if you ever get a result less than 1. In math notation, that’s:

It is better to memorize the sequences than to do this math in your head on the fly.

This example shows how you would practice shifting by three scale degrees ascending and then descending from frets 1 to 17:

The downward shifts are especially challenging, so take your time and practice them slowly at first. There are seven possible shifts to practice, but only two or three shifts will fit on one string at a time, so practice starting on different scale degrees to cover them all.

As before, practice this in free time until you don’t need to refer to diagrams or TAB. Then, practice it slowly with a metronome and gradually build up speed until the shifts become second nature. Finger speed is not the goal; you are working on making smooth transitions and reducing the mental effort required to find the next position.

Finally, practice shifting by two scale degrees. This is easy to do ascending because your index finger will always move to the third note of the current pattern, but it’s slightly more tricky when descending because you will be aligning the third note of the next pattern with the first note of the previous one. Similarly to shifting by threes, we add or subtract two (within the limited 1-7 range) to identify the next position.

Melodic sequences

All of the examples so far have used groups of three ascending notes, but there are many other ways to play each grouping. We could start at the upper note of each pattern and play the three notes descending. We could skip over the middle note and play just two notes for each grouping. Or we could play a longer melodic snippet on each grouping, making the number of possibilities grow quickly and endlessly.

Taking a melodic contour and applying it repeatedly to different positions within the scale creates a melodic sequence. Melodic sequences are one of the best ways to make your improvisations sound more melodic and less like playing scales up and down the neck.

I want to introduce shorthand notation for melodic sequences so we won’t need a lot of music notation and TAB for each example. In all previous examples, we have used the short melodic sequence [1-2-3], which means that we always played the first note in each three-note position, followed by the second and third. We will represent an upward shift of one scale degree as “>.” A shift downward will be “<, “ and I’ll repeat these to indicate larger shifts (e.g., “>>” for shifting two scale degrees up.

With this convention, the sequence [3 1 2 3 >] would yield:

Playing descending groups of four could be represented as [3 2 1 < 1]:

Some melodic contours can be represented in multiple ways. For example, we could play the exact same pattern of notes using the sequence [3 2 1 3 <]. In this version, each group of four begins on the second sixteenth note of each beat, and the initial E note at the 17th fret is left over from an incomplete sequence. You might choose one fingering over the other in a performance for various reasons, so it’s worth exploring multiple variations.

A common melodic sequence that can be achieved in multiple ways is playing a scale in thirds. The ascending sequences [1 3 >], [3 2 >], and [2 1 >] all yield the same basic pattern:

[3 1 >] yields wider intervals and is less often played but is also worth practicing:

When descending, [3 1 <], [1 2 <], and [2 3 <] all yield the same basic pattern:

And [1 3 <] yields the wider-interval variant:

As one final example, here is a simple six-note melodic sequence that Paul Gilbert or Yngwie Malmsteen might play at hyperspeed: [3 1 2 3 2 1 >]. Applied to the C major scale on the B string yields:

How to practice this

There’s a lot to explore in this space, and it’s important not to spend too much time practicing the same sequence, scale, and string combinations. Choose a different key and mode to focus on in each practice session. For example, if you chose the key of F Dorian, practice finding an F note on the fretboard, place your index finger over it, and start a melodic sequence using pattern 2 (because the Dorian mode starts on the second scale degree of the major scale).

Once you have chosen a key, spend 5-10 minutes playing a variety of melodic sequences. Start from root notes on different strings and practice sequences with different shift sizes, both up and down. The space of possibilities is enormous, and you are much better off inventing your own exercises than relying on any list written down in a guitar lesson or found in a book.

As you do this, you could practice several things simultaneously: root-finding, position shifts, picking, legato, speed, maintaining positional awareness within a scale, and more. Be careful to choose a combination close to the edge of your ability but not too far beyond it. You should always strive to play cleanly and musically with minimal muscle tension.