7 String Guitar Method: Book 1

By Graham Tippett

Most 7-string players are 6-string players carrying an extra string

They chug on the low B in drop tuning and ignore it the rest of the time. It isn't laziness. Nobody ever showed them how to integrate it, because the available material is reference books - grids of shapes for an instrument you're supposed to already know how to think about.

A reference book tells you where the notes are. It doesn't tell you how to play.

Three patterns, not five or seven

The system here reduces the whole fretboard to three scale patterns. That's not a shortcut or a simplification - it comes out of how a seven-string neck is actually laid out, and it's the reason the same three patterns carry straight over to arpeggios, triads and any mode you add later. Less to memorise than you currently use on six strings, covering more instrument.

Transfer, then go further

Everything you already know maps across: major and natural minor, both pentatonics, the blues scale, diatonic 7th arpeggios, triads and triad arpeggios, diatonic chords - all rebuilt across seven strings in any key.

Then the part a 6-string can't do. Voicings with a range no six-string reaches, intervals that only exist once you have that low B underneath, and how to use the string musically instead of percussively.

Who it's for

Players moving from six strings to seven who want a method rather than a dictionary. Guitarists with solid theory who need to get it onto a new fretboard. And anyone whose 7-string has been sitting in a case since about a month after they bought it, because it never quite clicked.

Book one of the method. An 8-string edition covers the same ground for eight.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1520605064
• ISBN13: 9781520605067
• Release Date: February 2017
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 40 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 8.0" x 10.0"