Welcome to System 5!  Now that you’ve completed the first four systems, you should have mastery of most of the core skills required by a professional-level guitarist. You should know all of your CAGED system arpeggios, pentatonics, and major scales. You should also know all of your 3-on-a-string modes and know how to find any interval from any finger. These are skills that probably only 1% of guitarists know. 

Of course, in order to become a complete guitarist, you need more than just exercises and competency of pentatonics, major scales, 3-on-a-string modes, arpeggios, and finger gymnastics. You will need to learn to apply these skills, and you must learn a musical vocabulary by transcribing other guitarists. However, you should already be seeing the power of these systems–how they help you not only to develop physical skills but also to connect the neck in a way that allows you to visualize the major scales modes, pentatonics, arpeggios, and octaves of the key you are in.

In System 5, we will push into some new territory. All of the scale and arpeggio exercises will be done using three string sets. This change will force you to see smaller patterns of your scales and arpeggios rather than the larger ‘boxes’ we’ve practiced in the first four systems. Just to give you fair warning: System 5 is likely to be the most challenging of all eight systems. But if you are able to complete System 5, you should feel that you have a real mastery over your basic scales and arpeggios.  

Because the scales and arpeggios are more time intensive than in the previous systems, we will only do a total of four exercises.