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:
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.