3d Most Common Scale Pattern

One octave starting on the 2d finger

So far, we’ve gotten familiar with one-octave scales starting on the open string, and patterns starting on the 3d finger. If you do them enough and get them into your muscle memory, rather than just understand the concepts in your head, you’ll find them super useful as you learn new tunes and recall old ones.

Starting on the 2d finger

The third most common one-octave scale pattern starts on the 2d finger. This will open you up to tunes in the keys of Bb, F, and C. In this pattern, the half-step, where two circles/fingers are touching, has moved down one more circle. Recall that in the open-string scale, the 2d & 3d were touching. In the scale starting on 3d finger, the half-step moved the 2d finger down one circle or finger’s width, so it was touching the 1st finger.

Now, when we start the pattern on the 2d finger, the half-step moves one more circle down, so it’s between open and 1st finger, with whole-steps (or a finger’s width) after the 1st, 2d, and 3d fingers.

Here’s how it looks:

The 1st, 2d, and 3d fingers are equidistant, a whole step (one empty circle) between each — but the 1st finger is right next to the nut (open string). Once again, the major scale here begins and ends on the dark blue note — starting with the low 2d finger and ending with the low 1st finger two strings higher.

So far, we haven’t really needed the 4th finger because we could use the open strings. In our next scale pattern, we’ll need that 4th finger! That will free us up to do all sorts of fancy things, as we’ll see.

Remember, it’s not enough to understand a pattern; you need to give your muscle memory a chance to really get to know it. The video below can be invaluable by allowing you to effortlessly play along and absorb the finger patterns for the scale and arpeggio patterns, by not only doing it as you hear it, but also by seeing the animated Finger Finder patterns as you play.

Next up: the fourth most common, but also most versatile, one-octave finger pattern, starting on the 1st finger.

Practice Video — Scale pattern starting on 2d finger

This video is #9 of ten in Technique Video Group 4 on fiddle-online.com.