Six String Triad Pairs
I've been getting back into guitar lately and stumbled on this idea, which made me wonder whether I know the fretboard at all. The idea is that since a triad has 3 notes, a triad pair has 6 and so should be playable as a chord (or at least a one-note-per-string arpeggio, in the awkward cases). How many ways are there to do that? Surely I already know all about diatonic triads, right? I found the results mildly terrifying.
Let's go easy to start with. We can play a triad on the top three strings (G-B-E) and another one on the bottom three (E-A-D). In each case there are three inversions in a given position, so there are 3x3 = 9 options. There's a bit of flexibility in exactly which triads we pick but generally there's one pairing for each that makes ergonomic sense. Here they are -- do you know all these chords? Do you know any of them? I don't think I did:

I especially like the fact that you can play fragments of these (simple example: just the middle four strings) and sometimes the result will be chords that aren't obviously related to triads at all.
OK but we can also play triads on non-consecutive string sets. There are 20 choices of 3 strings from 6 for the first triad; whichever you choose obviously determines the string set of the other triad. But there are 3 inversions and we can play any on any string set, so in theory we have 180 possibilities. One thing I learned a long time ago: with this kind of stuff (i.e. not core foundational things) you don't learn all of it from every angle, you go looking for something in it that you like and can spin into your own thing. Of those 189 options (including the ones above) there are surely many musical ideas that nobody has ever played before.
And that's just the boring old major scale! This trick will work with any 7-note scale: Harmonic Minor, Melodic Minor, Harmonic Major, Double Harmonic... The results often won't be conventional triads and the fingerings might get very awkward. But this seems to me like a nice, simple, effectively infinite source of "ways to mess with a scale and get some sounds out of it". In the past I've mostly used quartal chords in this way but I think I'm going to try triad pairs and see what I can get out of it.
I'll sign off with one of the many thousands of possibilities -- here's A Neapolitan with triads rooted on the first and sixth strings. Some of these are cool chords, others are a bit tough to finger that way but might make good melodic ideas:
