The main goal of this lesson is to teach you some of my favourite and the most common even note permutations to add into your economy picking vocabulary. This will arm you with some patterns that you can quickly grab when improvising to change direction in your economy picked lines. More importantly, I’d like to encourage you to come up with your own even note patterns to use in your runs.

If you’re serious about economy picking, building your vocabulary of even note petterns is going to be essential in building interesting lines and creating a unique vocabulary.

Even note patterns (by that I mean a pattern with an even number of notes on a single string) mean that the first and last note of the pattern are picked with opposite picking directions. This is a powerful tool for economy picking as it allows you to change direction smoothly. With a few even note patterns, you can create lines that go on forever as you will never run out of strings.

All of the examples in the video use the following 3 note per string C major shape:

The shape is 3 notes per string, and we will refer to the lowest note on each string as a 1, the middle note as a 2 and the highest note as a 3.

2 Note Permutations – (The first 3 are the most common)

1. 1-2
2. 1-3
3. 2-1
4. 2-3
5. 3-1
6. 3-2

Note: You can also double notes eg 1-1, 2-2, 3-3. Remember this when you’re creating your own 4 note and 6 – note patterns.

4 note Diatonic Permutations –

Common ones –

1. 1-2-3-1
2. 1-3-2-1
3. 2-3-2-1
4. 2-1-2-3
5. 3-1-2-3
6. 3-2-1-3

There are lots more permutations that you can experiment with and you can also introduce chromatics at this poitn.

1. 1-2-1-2
2. 1-2-1-3
3. 1-3-1-2
4. 1-3-1-3
5. 1-2-3-1
6. 1-2-3-2
7. 1-3-2-1
8. 1-3-2-3
9. 2-1-2-1
10. 2-1-2-3
11. 2-1-3-1
12. 2-1-3-2
13. 2-3-2-1
14. 2-3-2-3
15. 2-3-1-2
16. 2-3-1-3
17. 3-1-2-1
18. 3-1-2-3
19. 3-1-3-1
20. 3-1-3-2
21. 3-2-1-2
22. 3-2-1-2
23. 3-2-3-1
24. 3-2-3-2

6 Note Permutations – (Just my favourites, there are way too many to list them all)

1. 1-3-1-2-3-1
2. 1-3-2-1-2-3
3. 1-2-3-1-3-2
4. 1-2-3-2-3-1

6 Note patterns with chromaticism –

1. 1-2-3-2-b2-1 (Ascend then descend with one chromatic)
2. 3-2-1-b2-2-3 (Descend then ascend with one chromatic)
3. 1-3-2-b2-1-3

Note:Chromatics might have to go in different spots depending on where the spaces are in the fingering.

Even note patterns using two positions – Numbers before the comma are in the first position, numbers after the comma are in a shifted positon. Shifted positions can be higher or lower

1. 1-3,3-1
2. 1-2-3,3-1-2
3. 2-1-3,3-2-1
4. 1-2-3-1,1-2
5. 1-3-2-1,1-2
6. 1-3,3-2-1-2