Hi all,

Recently in my guitar studies, my teacher has reminded me of the concept of tetrachords.

After many years of lessons and reading guitar method books, I've often seen the concept of tetrachords for explaining theory under different scales, but not in terms of developing a knowledge of one's instrument through them. Typically, most books give a full scale (on the guitar at least) fingering at least in one octave, or in an entire position (e.g. frets 3 through 5, all notes that fall within the scale).

But recently, the thought has occurred to me that one can mix and match a variety of tetrachords to build a variety of scales and soloing strategies with less mental effort, e.g. easier to combine 2 well understood tetrachords than memorize whole new scale fingerings - of course the outcome is the same (or maybe not ?).

Does anyone apply tetrachords in real time during their soloing, or do you think separate full ocatve scale tones (e.g. 8 for the modes, 5 for the pentatonics, etc.) ?