Practice Generator

Sadly I’m so bad with numbers that I’d never be a real math geek (not that I aspire to it or anything), but I do enjoy the conceptual end of things, the applied mathematics. I’ve discovered how the application of mathematical concepts to guitar playing can make for a lot of practice material. Say you have three notes – with just those three notes you can make 27 exercises. Say I have three notes, A, B, and C:

AAA

AAB
AAC
BBB
BBA
BBC
CCC
CCA
CCB
ABB
ABC
ABA
BAA
BAC
BAB
CAA
CAB
CAC
ACC
ACB
ACA
BCC
BCA
BCB
CBB
CBA
CBC

That’s 27 sequences to practice – granted many of them are boring and useless, but you can weed out the ones that suck. Better yet you can mix and match to make 6-note sequences like CAB-CBA. I further discovered that you take any number, and take it to its power, and that will give you the number of possible exercises:

2 notes = 22 = 4 combinations
3 notes = 33 = 27 combinations
4 notes = 44 = 256 combinations
5 notes = 55 = 3,125 combinations

And so on. And that’s just a few particular notes. Factor that times a 12-tone system of music and a 4-octave guitar and you’ll never run out of crap to practice.