The Two Position Guitar Scale System: Scales and Arpeggios

By Graham Tippett

CAGED gives you five positions. Three-notes-per-string gives you seven. This gives you two.

Not two as a starting point, with the rest to follow. Two per key, covering the whole neck, and that's the system.

Most guitarists spend years memorising scale patterns that never quite turn into confident improvisation. The patterns get learned, the theory gets studied, and then the chords go past and the whole thing falls apart. That isn't a failure of discipline. It's what happens when you have to learn five to seven positions before any of it becomes musically useful - that's a very long time to woodshed before you can play anything.

The 2 Position System reduces the learning curve by roughly 80%. Not by taking shortcuts, but by being organised more efficiently. You still put the work in. There's just far less of it before the results show up.

What you'll learnThe core system - two positions per key, across all twelve keysHow to change between scales fluidly instead of getting stranded in one positionOpen position scales, integrated rather than treated as a separate thing to learnHow to stack positions for larger, connected coverage of the fretboardArpeggios built into the same framework - same logic, same positions, no second system to memoriseMusical application throughout, rather than patterns for their own sake
Scales and arpeggios in one system

Most methods teach scales, then teach arpeggios separately, and leave you to work out how they relate. Here they come out of the same two positions. Learn where the scale is and you already know where the arpeggio is, because they're the same piece of fretboard viewed at different densities.

That's the difference between knowing your arpeggios and being able to reach for one while a chord is going past.

Who this is for

Guitarists who can already play, have worked through scale patterns before, and are tired of a fretboard that only makes sense in the position they happen to be in. If you've tried CAGED or three-notes-per-string and found yourself memorising far more than you were using, this is the alternative.

Complete beginners will find it heavy going. It assumes you know your basic chords and can find your way around the neck.

The complete edition

This is the full system, expanded well beyond the earlier introductory volume - scale changes, open position, stacked positions and the entire arpeggio framework are new here. You don't need the introduction first. This book stands on its own.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1519030797
• ISBN13: 9781519030795
• Release Date: October 2016
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 44 Pages
• Weight: 0.31 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 8.0" x 10.0"