First Scale

From StickiWiki

There are many ways to play a major scale on the Stick, but one of the simplest is this:

Note, the left side of the diagram is toward the tuners and the right side of the diagram is toward the bridge and pickup. The scale is designed to be played on the melody side of the Stick with the right hand. A comfortable position is such that the highest fret shown is the twelfth fret. If you are plying an instrument with more melody strings, use any contiguous group of 5 strings on the melody side. It works with all tunings that are commonly used (any tuning with straight forths on the melody side).

There are two approaches to playing this scale and melodic lines in general. The first is the approach Emmett Chapman pioneered, which is used by many other Stick players such as Greg Howard. It is called the three-finger approach. For this approach you play the lowest fret shown with your first finger (forefinger), the highest fret shown with your third finger (ring finger), and the two middle frets with your second finger. Though this seems less logical at first, it avoids a physiological issue. Inside the muscles of your hand, the third finger (ring finger) and fourth finger (pinky) share a tendon, so there are issues of independence and strength.

In Emmett's original Stick book Free Hands, he created a system for showing which fingers are used on the fretboard. His system uses a circle for the forefinger, a diamond for the second finger, a triangle for the third finger, and a square for the fourth finger. Below is the same scale using these shapes to show the three-finger fingering:

The other method is to use all four fingers and have each play one fret. Some other prominent Stick players like Bob Culbertson use this approach. As a point of observation, most of the Stick players I have seen using the four-finger approach successfully have large hands or especially long fingers. Below is the same scale using the shapes to show the four-finger fingering: