Much more than our Keyboard or horn-playing cousins, we guitarists get to rely on shapes to navigate our instrument. Learn one major scale pattern, move it up and down the neck, and you've got all the major scales. (Try that on a saxophone!) Some shapes are easier to finger than others, and that's what this lesson is about. We're going to take a few simple, symmetrical shapes to play some really difficult-sounding licks.

Ex.1a shows a beautifully simple chunk of A Dorian -- starting on F#, the scale's 6 -- with the b5 (Eb) thrown in to maintain symmetry and add harmonic spice. Ex. 1b mixes those notes up in a Van Halen-style run that will work over an Am7 or A7#9 vamp. Don't let the sixteenth-note triplets scare you -- the fingering here is as simple as can be.

The notes in Ex. 2a come from the E blues scale. The five-fret stretch gives us Es on both the E and B strings. It's this redundancy that gives Ex. 2b its trippy stuttering quality. As you move from string to string, the fingerings will feel familiar, but some of the notes might take you by surprise. Pick the Es on the E string, hammer the Es on the B string, and go to town.

We'll stretch our fretting hand further in Ex. 3a, and in doing so we'll introduce a bit of twisted chromaticism. Because of these weird notes, Ex. 3b sounds extra funky over a G9 groove. The bluesy closer in bar 2 will de-quease any listeners who got seasick in the previous measure.

So now you've got a few cool new licks to play, but -- more importantly -- you've got a taste of just how much music you can generate on the guitar using simple shapes and patterns. With a little ingenuity, you can take this concept to the nth degree.

What are you waiting for?

Photo: Paul Haggard