The importance of practicing caged positions in all keys

[MarkRhodes]

It's funny about Herb Ellis and the shapes. He numbers them in the order he introduces them in his books, but his "shape one" in "Blues Shapes" is not the same "shape one" as in "Swing Blues." Herb doesn't care what one calls them.

He found them handy physically----he associated lines with the shapes and the point of learning the system is that wherever you are on the neck, you know how to make a line sound there. (Herb wasn't big on scale practice per se; he wanted players to learn lines they could use and then experiment with the lines. Robert Conti's approach is a lot like that too.)

[christianm77]

They ARE "just passing notes"..... sort of,.....but they very often imply something larger about the harmony as well.

If you watch him comp, he basically can play melodic/chromatic comping lines, almost like a chord melody, better than some of us can play single-note chromatic. He literally does hear the "implications" and "possible implications" in chromatic/melodic lines. I ain't there yet. :-)

I should probably watch more of his videos.

[emanresu]

Heh.. I once saw a rather skillful player promoting his new scale book in youtube. He said there's everything in it.. it was 2 cm thick A4. Then he spoke a bit about scales and said "look at this stupid pattern - so uncomfortable, completely useless. Buy my book instead, I'll show you" He was talking about my favorite pattern to pick chords from

I love my only-3-patterns not to play solos(I'd hate that so much) but to pick useful chord voicings from. I think it's the other way round what is usually done - it seems to me that mostly people learn a single good voicing for a chord and tie a scale to it. I do the opposite. If you haven't, I suggest to try this out. Not gonna guarantee any miracles but that's just very possible way to do it also. That's all. I'm no authority though.