Technique

"Ladder" patters are patterns that climb up or down the neck rapidly using only a small number of strings. Since I'm posting a lot about symmetrical scales at the moment, here are some ladder patterns for the Whole-Half and Half-Whole Diminshed scales. Remember that these scales are modes of each other, so which scale you're playing will be determined by where you play these patterns on the fretboard in relation to the background tonality.

Three-note-per-string patterns are extremely useful for playing heptatonic scales such as those in the major, harmonic minor and melodic minor modal groups. In the previous lesson we looked at some different patterns we can use to play these to break up the usual straight-up-and-down approach. In this we look at some more.

This lesson and the ones that come after it are about working out the possible orders in which you can play patterns involving 3, 4 or more notes per string. Before we get into that, let's look at an example of what I mean.