Improvisation tricks – diagonal patterns

Welcome to another Guitar Noize guitar lesson, this lesson will also be available at shredknowledge.com, check Shred Knowledge out for more free guitar lessons.

Most of us are not born with the natural ability to improvise on guitar, actually I doubt that anyone is. The thing about improvisation is that you can improve with practice and a few tips and tricks. The tips and tricks I am talking about are strategies to help you make ideas flow together seamlessly without hopefully sounding composed, and don’t worry this isn’t a dirty little secret of the guitar underworld, it is a perfectly legitimate part of improving as a guitarist.

I am going to show you how you can use 2 string patterns to move diagonally up the fretboard without having to think. This is not a magic trick, although it does work like magic. The basic idea is that we will play a sequence of notes from a scale on 2 strings, then shift that pattern up 2 strings to the next octave and then shift the pattern once again to the top 2 strings and another octave. The pattern will remain the same so you only need to learn it once!

Let’s take an A minor Pentatonic scale to start, we’ll use notes from this scale to form our patterns.

 

The magic comes from the way the strings on a guitar are tuned in 4ths (except the B which is a 3rd above G), a note on the bottom E string is replicated 2 strings and 2 frets higher so by playing an A and a C at the 5th and 8th frets on the E you can then play the same notes and octave higher on the D string at the 7th and 10th frets. The same applies to the A string with the G string so lets dive into an example to see what I am talking about.

 

Now the jump from the D & G strings is slightly different, the shift is now 3 frets instead of 2 due to the B string being a major 3rd interval rather than a 4th but the pattern is still the same.

 

So this little 4 note pentatonic pattern has suddenly taken you from the 5th fret on the bottom E string to the 12th fret of the top E string through 2 octaves and you haven’t had to even break a sweat trying to figure out the necessary scale box positions. Of course by knowing these you have now leapt into a new position which should inspire you to play the scale a little differently from 1st position and if you get stuck you can always descend with the same method. Try descending with a different pattern from the same scale:

 

As you can see it really doesn’t matter which notes you choose from the scale, you just replicate the pattern in the different octave positions. This means that you don’t really need to learn from an example you just need to experiment with different note combinations from scales. By doing this you will probably have a few patterns that you prefer that you can always fall back on should you get stuck during a solo or just want to move up a position for further inspiration!