Turn Five Shapes into One Connected Map

Day 15 | about 25 minutes

Joint 1 to 2

Focus: find the crossing points between the first two shapes and use all of them.

• 3 min: Mark the shared notes between Shapes 1 and 2 on the diagram, then cover it. The board has done the marking: the three gray dots are notes both shapes hold, G at the fifth fret of the D course, D at the fifth fret of the A course and A at the fifth fret of the E course, and the C at the fifth fret of the G course is a fourth one that stays orange because it is the root. All four sit at the fifth fret, straight across the neck, which is the easiest overlap to remember in the whole week. Say the four names out loud, then cover the board.
• 8 min: Loop the joint: four notes in Shape 1, cross, four in Shape 2; reverse. The second board draws one loop. Shape 1: A and C on the G course, frets 2 and 5. Then E and G on the D course, frets 2 and 5. Move into Shape 2 on that G. Shape 2: A at fret 7 of the D course. Then D and E on the A course, frets 5 and 7. Then A at fret 5 of the E course. Come back down the same notes in reverse. Keep going without a stop for eight minutes.
• 6 min: Cross on three different strings. The three gray notes sit on three different courses, so each one gives a crossing on a different string: G at the fifth fret of the D course, D at the fifth fret of the A course, A at the fifth fret of the E course. Run the loop three times, once through each. The one on the E course is the one players skip, because it falls at the top of the phrase where there is least time to think.
• 6 min: Make four phrases that begin in 1 and resolve in 2. A phrase resolves where it stops, so this is four short lines that start under the Shape 1 hand and finish on a note in Shape 2 that sounds finished: the C at the eighth fret of the E course, or the A at the fifth. Keep each one to about eight notes and a breath. If the last note leaves you wanting another one, it has not resolved, whichever shape it was in.
• 2 min: Name the shared notes aloud. C, G, D and A, all at the fifth fret, low course to high, and the C is the root. Say them without looking at the board. Tomorrow's joint has a different set, so being able to say this one from memory first is what keeps the two apart.

Why the same five notes have two names: C, D, E, G and A are the C major pentatonic and the A minor pentatonic at once. Nothing about the notes changes, only which one you treat as home: the orange dots on the board are C and the dots marked 6 are A. Stop on C and it sounds like C major, stop on A and it sounds like A minor. That is the whole difference, and Week 4 spends two days on it.

• End-of-day check: Three crossing points available.

Day 16 | about 25 minutes

Joint 2 to 3

Focus: cross the second joint without the pulse noticing.

• 3 min: Visualize the overlap before playing. Shapes 2 and 3 meet on four notes, and the board grays three of them: D at the seventh fret of the G course, A at the seventh fret of the D course and E at the seventh fret of the A course, with the C at the eighth fret of the E course staying orange because it is the root. Three of the four are at the seventh fret, so this overlap is nearly as straight across as yesterday's. Picture the four of them before you pick anything.
• 8 min: Loop 2 to 3 in groups of 3, then 5. Three notes in Shape 2, cross on a gray note, three in Shape 3, cross back. Going up that is C at the fifth fret of the G course, D at the seventh, G at the fifth fret of the D course, then across on the A at the seventh fret of the D course and on through Shape 3 with C at the tenth and E at the seventh fret of the A course. Then make it five a side, which pushes the crossing onto a different note, because five notes will not fit between the same two.
• 6 min: Start each loop on a different scale degree. The five notes are C, D, E, G and A, which are degrees 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6. Start one loop on C, the next on D, the next on E, and on through all five. The notes do not change but the shape of the thing does, and starting on the 3rd or the 6th is what stops a loop sounding like an exercise that begins where exercises begin.
• 6 min: Question in Shape 2; answer in Shape 3. A question is a phrase that stops somewhere unfinished, on the D at the seventh fret of the G course say, leaving the ear waiting. An answer is a phrase in the same rhythm that closes it, arriving on a C: the tenth fret of the D course or the eighth of the E course. Four or five pairs is plenty, and the two halves should sound like a pair rather than two ideas in a row.
• 2 min: Log the cleanest crossing note. Of the four notes the two shapes share, one will have come out smoothest. Write it down with its fret, because that is your default door at this joint, and the other three are what tomorrow drills.

What question and answer means: Two phrases that belong together. The first leaves something open, usually by stopping on a note that is not the root, and the second closes it in the same rhythm, usually by arriving on one. Playing the question out of one shape and the answer out of another is what turns a position change into a musical event rather than a piece of hand management.

• End-of-day check: Cross without breaking the eighth-note pulse.

Day 17 | about 25 minutes

Joint 3 to 4

Focus: make the third joint as available going down as going up.

• 3 min: Locate the tonic and the relative minor root in both shapes. The tonic is C and the relative minor's root is A, and the board marks both: the orange dots are C, the dots marked 6 are A. In Shape 3 the C's are the tenth fret of the D course and the eighth of the E course, and the A is the seventh fret of the D course. In Shape 4 the C is the tenth fret of the D course and the A is the twelfth fret of the A course. Touch all five before you play a note.
• 8 min: Loop 3 to 4 on all available string pairs. The two shapes share four notes and the board grays three: E at the ninth fret of the G course, G at the tenth fret of the A course and D at the tenth fret of the E course, with the C at the tenth fret of the D course staying orange as the root. A string pair is the course you leave from and the course you arrive on, so crossing at the ninth fret of the G course is a different move from crossing at the tenth of the A course. Work through all of them rather than settling on the first one that works.
• 6 min: Ascend through 3, descend through 4. Go up the Shape 3 window from the D at the seventh fret of the G course to the D at the tenth of the E course, then come straight back down through Shape 4 with no pause: E at the twelfth fret of the E course, D at the tenth, A at the twelfth fret of the A course, G at the tenth, and on down. The turn at the top is the thing being practiced, and it should not be audible as a change of anything except direction.
• 6 min: Four 2-bar phrases with only one direction change. Eight beats, about eight notes, and the line turns round exactly once: up then down, or down then up. That is harder than it sounds, because the hand likes to wobble back and forth. One turn per phrase is what gives a line a shape instead of a wiggle.
• 2 min: Mark hesitation. Write where the line paused, going up or coming down, and on which note. Both directions are meant to be equally available by the end of today, which is what the proof line says, so an honest note here is what tells you whether to repeat the day.

• End-of-day check: Both directions feel equally available.

Day 18 | about 25 minutes

Joint 4 to 5

Focus: vary which finger starts the shift, so the crossing is not one memorized move.

• 3 min: Silent map of the overlap. Shapes 4 and 5 share four notes and all four are at the twelfth fret, one on each course: G on the G course, D on the D course, A on the A course, E on the E course, which are the open string names an octave up. None of them is C, so this is the one joint in the week with no root in it, and all four dots come out gray. Picture that line of four before you play.
• 8 min: Loop 4 to 5; vary which finger initiates the shift. The crossing notes are all at the twelfth fret, so the question is which finger arrives there. Cross with the index and the hand lands ready to carry on up; cross with the pinky and it lands ready to come back down. Take the loop through each finger in turn. A joint you can only cross with one finger is a joint that fails whenever the phrase arrives from the other direction.
• 6 min: Sequence three notes per shape, then five per shape. Three in Shape 4 going up: C at the tenth fret of the D course, D at the twelfth, G at the tenth fret of the A course. Cross on the A at the twelfth fret of the A course and take three in Shape 5: A, E at the twelfth fret of the E course, G at the fifteenth. Then do it five a side. Count the notes out loud, because up here every fret looks the same and miscounting is the easiest thing in the world.
• 6 min: Begin in 5, resolve below in 4. Start high, in Shape 5 at the twelfth fret and above, and finish low, on a note in Shape 4 that sounds settled, which is usually the C at the tenth fret of the D course. Coming down to a resolution feels different from climbing to one, and up here it is the more useful of the two, because the top of the neck is where a line runs out of room.
• 2 min: Log the least natural route. At the twelfth fret the four crossing notes feel much more alike than they do lower down, so one of them will still have been awkward. Write it down with the finger you used, because this high up it is usually the finger and not the note that is the problem.

Up where the neck runs out: These two shapes sit at and above the twelfth fret, where the frets are narrow, the notes are quieter and every crossing looks the same. Two things help: leave the thumb where it was rather than climbing with the whole hand, and pick a little nearer the bridge so the notes keep some body. If the intonation goes here, it is usually the left hand squeezing rather than the shape being wrong.

• End-of-day check: Three clean routes across the joint.

Day 19 | about 25 minutes

Outer connection

Focus: stop treating the top of Shape 5 as the end of the road.

• 3 min: Find the repeated register where Shape 5 leads toward Shape 1. The two share no fret at all, which is why this board has no gray dots on it. What joins them is the octave: the C at the third fret of the A course in Shape 1 and the C at the fifteenth fret of the same course in Shape 5 are the same note twelve frets apart, and so are the G at the third fret of the E course and the G at the fifteenth. Find those two pairs and you have found the connection.
• 8 min: Practice 5 to 1 across the octave and reverse. On a longer neck the road carries on above Shape 5 into Shape 1 an octave up. A mandolin has no room for that, so the connection is played as a register change: reach the top of Shape 5 and come back into Shape 1 twelve frets lower on the same course, landing on the C at the third fret of the A course or the G at the third fret of the E course. The move is big and it cannot be hidden, so do not try to hide it. Play it deliberately, land on a note that belongs, and keep the pulse across the gap. Then work it the other way, out of Shape 1 and up into Shape 5.
• 6 min: Chain 4 to 5 to 1 and 1 to 5 to 4. Three windows in a row means two different kinds of joint in one line: 4 to 5 is an ordinary crossing at the twelfth fret, and 5 to 1 is the octave. Play up through Shape 4, on through Shape 5, then the register change into Shape 1, then turn round and come back. The second version is harder, because the octave now happens on the way up rather than as a way out of the top.
• 6 min: Phrase across the outer connection without ending on the shift note. The shift note is whichever C or G you used to make the jump, and a phrase that ends on it sounds like the jump was the point of the phrase. Land past it instead: cross to the C at the third fret of the A course and carry on down to the E at the second fret of the D course, or up to the D at the fifth fret of the A course. Four or five phrases is enough.
• 2 min: Note the usable register limits. Write down the highest note you can play up there and still hear as music rather than as a squeak, and the lowest note down here that does not vanish under a band. Those two are your real range, and they matter more than the ones the shapes draw.

What the outer connection is: The five shapes are a cycle rather than a ladder: after Shape 5 comes Shape 1 again, an octave higher. On a mandolin neck that octave does not exist, so the top of Shape 5 hands back to the bottom of Shape 1 as a change of register instead. A player who does not know this treats the top of the neck as a dead end and turns round there every time, which is audible.

• End-of-day check: The outer connection is no longer a dead end.

Day 20 | about 25 minutes

Full chain

Focus: run the whole road once, then repair only what broke.

• 3 min: Point to the starting tonic of all five shapes. A shape's starting tonic is the first C in it going up. Shape 1's is the fifth fret of the G course and so is Shape 2's; Shape 3's is the tenth fret of the D course and so is Shape 4's; Shape 5's is the fifteenth fret of the A course. Two pairs sharing a C is not a mistake in the picture: the windows overlap, which is exactly what the brackets under the board are saying.
• 10 min: Ascend 1 to 5 and descend 5 to 1; isolate, repair, then restore any broken joint. Run the whole road up, four joints in a row, then back down. When one breaks, stop the run and work on that joint alone, in threes and fives the way its own day did, and then put it back into the full run before you move on. Restoring it is the part people skip, and a joint repaired on its own has not been repaired.
• 5 min: Travel again using no more than four notes in any shape. Four notes to a window means you cross eight or ten times going up and down instead of four, so the hand never settles anywhere. This is the first taste of a diagonal, which Week 4 builds properly, and it should feel like traveling rather than like five boxes visited in order.
• 5 min: One-minute free phrase chain; keep the rests. A phrase chain is one phrase after another, each starting where the last left off, for a whole minute. Keeping the rests means not filling the gaps: the breath between two phrases is what makes them phrases. If a minute is too long to fill, that is worth knowing, and thirty seconds played well beats a minute played badly.
• 2 min: Score each joint 1 to 5. Four joints, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, 3 to 4 and 4 to 5, plus the outer connection if you want a fifth number. Give each one a mark out of five and write them in a row, because tomorrow repairs the lowest one and Week 8 asks for this same row again.

• End-of-day check: One uninterrupted round trip.

Day 21 | about 25 minutes

Phase check

Focus: record the round trip and hear whether it is a scale or a line.

• 3 min: One silent visualization pass. Go up the whole road in your head, naming the notes as they come and touching nothing: A, C, E, G, C, D, G, A through Shape 1, and on into Shape 2. Today's board is written in note names rather than degrees for exactly this, because naming is half of what a phase check tests. If a name will not come, that is the joint to look at before you record.
• 10 min: Record Shape 1 to 5 to 1 at a steady, musical pulse. One take, up the road and back down, with the recorder running. A musical pulse is a speed you could play a tune at, not a speed you are surviving. Say the shape numbers out loud as you enter them if it helps you keep count, and the recording will show whether that was a checkpoint or a crutch.
• 5 min: Replay and repair only the weakest joint. One joint, not all of them. Listen with your hands off the instrument, find the place where the pulse moved or a note came in late, and work that one crossing until it holds at the same speed as the rest of the road.
• 5 min: Re-record as phrases, not a scale. The same road at the same speed, broken into phrases of four to eight notes with breaths between them. Nothing about the notes changes. What changes is whether somebody hearing it would think you were practicing or playing, which is what the proof line at the foot of this day is asking.
• 2 min: Decide whether the Week 4 broadening is needed. Week 4 takes these five shapes to four more keys. If today's round trip passed in C and you can already do it in one other key, the workbook lets you fold Week 4 into the warm-ups of the weeks after it rather than taking it whole. If C is the only key it works in, take Week 4 as written.

• End-of-day check: No hesitation at any transition.