Intervallic Picking Exercises--Part 3

By Scott Hesse

For this, the third installment of Intervallic Picking exercises, I want to further the challenge. The first exercise took three successive notes in ever-widening intervals and ascended through an octave. Then, last time, I reversed the exercise and had you descend through the ever-widening intervals. This time you'll combine the ascending and descending intervals into a longer, more challenging exercise.

The idea is the same: hone your technique while training your ear to hear all the different interval combinations. What you find in the illustration below are all the various intervals from a minor 2nd up through a major 7th. As you can see, you ascend through the first three intervals of each type then descend the same interval type from an octave above.

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Each combination of ascending and descending intervals can become its own exercise. As you know, I'm a big advocate of breaking bigger exercises into smaller ones to get a better handle of them. In fact, that's how I conceived this whole exercise sequence in the first place. Maybe you just want to isolate moving from the m6 sequence to the M6 sequence above. That could be an exercise of itself. Listen closely to how each interval pattern strikes your ear. Whatever sounds interesting to your ear should be your inspiration for further exploration.

Happy practicing!!