Awesome exercise

HI I thought I'd share this awesome but simple scale exercise.

I was shown this by a guy called Sheldon King who is a great guitar player from Bristol. I've been using it on guitar and bass and it's very very good. He showed it to me about 3 years ago and it's only now I've had the time to practice it.

Basically, you take any position of the major scale.

Then start making triads (1,3,5). Start making a triad from the bottom note of your position, then move up stepwise.

So if C was at the bottom and you were playing in the key of C major, you would get

C E G
D F A
E G B
F A C
etc

So you're moving up the scale playing major, minor and diminished triads.

That is just the start though, because there are 6 ways of playing the triads

135
153
351
315
513
531

If you practice all of them you get different note combinations.

Then you can start combining - in other words, alternate (for example) 135 and 531. This would give

CEG
AFD
EGB
CAF
etc

WHY BOTHER? Because basically if you do this, you're using a simple set of rules you can work through to program into your fingertips a virtually endless set of permutations.

You can use the same exercise for triads based on fourths, and triads based on fifths (sixths might be a bit tough for a triad).

This might seem like a strange exercise, but it's a great way of practicing using scales and modes in a way that will program patterns that are a bit more interesting than just up and down.