The Really Broken Triad

Many guitar players have spent some time working on playing major or melodic minor modes in broken triads in closed position.

I’ve been working for a few days on playing ideas which essentially deal with the same concept of broken triads but moving the voice-leading in the opposite direction of the progression.

Notice how the progression is ascending but the voicings are descending and changing inversion in a regular pattern. While I’ve come up with some lines that use the very horizontal kind of hand movement that I think it’s natural to use on the guitar when faced with this kind of material, some of the lines I’ve come up with seem to be much more suited to closed (or almost-closed) position. This is where the lightbulb turned on.

Could it be possible to play a mechanical pattern in closed position that differs from the pattern above in that instead of going from C to Dm you would go from C to

Bdim/D?

It is also possible to do this exercise 3 different ways in each position, starting on C as well as Am/C or F/C as the first chord.

How would this sound in all the other modes of major and minor? What kind of new movements and sounds might this unlock during improvisations? Is this the key to connecting all the horizontal work of disjunct voice-leading with position playing?

I personally find it much harder to sing and hear the progression when playing this way. It’s an interesting challenge. One good tip I got from Mitch Haupers at the workshop this summer is to sing the roots while doing exercises like this to help you hear the progression a bit more clearly at first.

Here are a few more licks that involve similar ideas and a video showing a couple of the more horizontal ideas (systems 1 and 5):