Hopefully, you have had an opportunity to become familiar with the extended modal shapes. It is important to have a good idea of what these shapes actually look and/or feel like. If you can not see to draw the shapes, then you will need to use some sort of a tactile representation. A metal grid that has six rows and 24 columns, works rather well as a tactile model of the guitar neck. You want the squares to be large enough in the grid that you can set checkers or perhaps old Othello pieces inside the squares to represent the notes in the shape you want to become more familiar with.

Once you have a method by which to represent these shapes so that you can study them more intently, you will start to notice something interesting. Take for instance the extended Locrian shape in its standard position.

Extended Locrian shape:
E7, E8, E10
A7, A8, A10
D7, D9, D10
G7, G9, G10
B8, B10, B12
H8, H10

We can study this shape and actually see the shapes of chords, such as,

Chord 1:
[E8, A10, D10]
[C, G, C]


Chord 2:
[E8, A10, D9, G9]
[C, G, B, E]


Chord 3:
[A10, D9, G7, B6]
[G, B, D, G]


Since these chords are composed of notes in our extended Locrian shape, we can experiment by playing the extended Locrian shape over these chords. This works best if you record these chords onto tape or CD first. Or, if you have another person handy to play the chords while you play the extended Locrian shape at the same time, that would work also. Please note that I only derived three chords from the extended Locrian shape above. If you perform your own examination on this shape, you will find many more such chords on your own.

Let's look at another extended shape, such as the Extended Lydian shape.


Extended Lydian shape
E1, E3, E5
A2, A3, A5
D2, D3, D5
G2, G4, G5
B3, B5, B6
H3, H5

Again, we will extract chords from the notes of the above extended shape, such as,

Chord 1:
[E1, A3, D3]
[F, C, F]


Chord 2:
[A5, D3, G2]
[D, F, A]


Chord 3:
[D2, G4, B3]
[E, B, D]

The nice thing about this is that once again we do not need a lot of complicated music theory to hunt for shapes inside another shape. And anything we find is itself a shape that can be moved up and down the length of the guitar neck.

What I want you to do is to examine the other extended shapes and see what chord shapes you can find inside them. Just think of each extended shape as a gold mine and when you find a new chord shape, try playing the extended shape over the chords you find in that shape as before in the case of the extended Locrian shape.


Corey J. Bray