Exercise: Playing scales in thirds

I‘ve never really practiced playing scales in sequences like thirds until recently. The idea behind it is simple. Play a note of the scale, skip the next one, repeat.

It sounds like this:

The goal is not to shred but to slow down. I realized immediate improvement in sight reading capabilities and fretboard knowledge - if you play as fast as you can say the name of the notes aloud. Verbalize.

You can start with all the major or minor scale patterns systematically or in your own choosing.

Like this for example.

Have a listen:

Playing the exercise using three notes per string:

Or you can interconnect different scale patterns horizontally. This example uses three notes per string starting at the 3rd fret horizontally and goes back vertically at the end, finishing at the 15th fret.

You can tinker around with neighbor notes. For example scale note, one diatonic lower neighbor note and then scale note and third.

The blue boxes indicates the additional tones and the green ones shows the thirds.

Or two neighbor notes down. This is very well suited for shred idea licks. This time in C major resp. A minor. The concept looks like this:

If you practice these ideas in all 12 keys it will take a long time. I try to incorporate one key per practice sessions in the next weeks. It is a nice warm up routine for a couple of minutes as well. Three minutes naming notes could be considered a big step - if you are a typical guitar player like me relying on tabs your whole life.

If you have trouble visualizing and verbalizing the scale at the same time - just write it on a piece of paper. I find it tremendous harder not to. You really need to concentrate a lot on the beginning.