Part 2 of “The Mother of All Major Scale Exercises” will be a little harder than Part 1. (Make sure you check out Part 1 before diving into this.) Now we limit the exercise to two strings at a time, shifting positions more frequently. The challenge is to keep the entire position always in your head, even if your fingers get used to the patterns of the major scale on two adjacent strings.
All the examples are in F major for this part of the exercise. Remember to cycle through all twelve keys to really master your major scales and conquer the fretboard. Here are the five CAGED positions for the F major scale:
And here is the tablature for today’s version of the exercise in F major, on strings 5 and 6:
Hopefully that provides enough for you to understand how the exercise works and extrapolate to the four other string pairs and 11 other keys. (If not, leave a comment and I’ll walk you through it. Or we could do a Skype guitar lesson.)
Remember to proceed slowly. There’s no point in building speed. It’s a major mental workout to recall a complete scale shape every few notes, so focus on that. Do one or two of these per day, and it will get easier very quickly.
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