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Scale Exercise

Ricardo Dias


One of the thousand benefits I had from Kamp was meeting Carlo Aonzo, what a character! Inspired by his scale and a chromatic exercise I've been doing for a long time - I decided to develop a practice of my own that I think might help many CoMandos, from beginners to advanced players. It will surely help people to upgrade many aspects of playing such as: finger strength, scale vision on the fretboard, cross picking, dexterity, rhythm counting, 16ths fluency stamina, picking prowess through acting with different number of notes per string, etc.. the exercise is written in F major, although it starts on its third note A on the G string. It might be done in any scale, be it closed or open stringed. It should be done in many, for a true fretboard vision to be developed. Due to difficulties in saving, I've only written it until the second position, but it should be done until the fretboard becomes impossible to reach and then, back to the nut. That is, involving the same scale in ALL positions... a good trial would be to do the exercise backwards, but that`s another story...

Speed - very slowly at the beginning, preferably with a metronome. I included a drum pad sound at the first note of the 16ths cell, for better rhythm counting. With time, as you wish, you may set it up to whatever speed you feel confortable... advanced players might get to it faster.