Volume IV: Quintuplet Arpeggios for Guitar.

But—and this is my favorite part—this is not an arpeggio book. Instead, this is a music book with real musical examples of quintuplet arpeggios. This is a “how do you play arpeggios as quintuplets” book. Every one of the more than 100 examples in this book is a real, road-tested, gig-approved five-note musical figure. Not some stale, Artificial Intelligence generated “looks good on paper but there’s no way to play it and it only sounds good to robots,” crap. These futtuplet figures are the future.

This book is the first in a series that constitutes the definitive study of quintuplets for rock guitar. It provides an in-depth introduction to five-note patterns, thoroughly discusses their place in music theory, and offers an exhaustive inventory of applied examples for use in the real world of modern rock guitar. There is a distinct possibility that when you work all the way through this series your heart will beat in quintuplets. Mine does.

This, the second book in the series, focuses on a hundred or so short, repeatable futtuplets I call cycles. A cycle is really just a lick, a riff, an ostinato, a musical figure. A set of notes to be repeated. In our work here, we’ll be working on 5-note sets. Sometimes, we’ll expand our vision to two sets of five, or a 10-note set.

Cycles are critical for two-and-a-half reasons.

Firstly, as a learning tool. Remember from the first book, futtuplets are odd and hard. A five-note pattern takes some getting used to. So, we are going to take a 4-beat measure and POUND five notes into each beat. (When we put four notes to each beat, the grouping is called sixteenth notes, because there will 16 of them in the whole measure. For five notes to the beat, we could call them twentieth notes. Instead, we’ll call them futtuplets. We’re musicians. It’s better to be cool than precise.). Each beat gets five notes. When the next beat comes around, we’re going to repeat those five notes in that order. Rinse. Repeat. Secondly, cycles are critical infrastructure for soloing. Repetition is how a musician emphasizes something to her audience. Repetition is how a musician emphasizes something to her audience. She communicates, “This is important! You should be getting this!” Cycles lay the foundation, build things up, provide the basis for variation and development, connect ideas, and finish them off.

This book focuses exclusively on futtuplet sequences—those long descending or ascending patterns that seem to fold into themselves as they work their way from one octave to another. The stuttering, stumbling, hitch-stepping mathematical permutations that snake along from one end of the fretboard to the other, five steps at a time. Their five-notes-to-the-beat rhythmic grouping makes them inherently strange, weird, and hard for others to follow. Satch calls them “the sound of liquid mercury.” To me, they are poetry in motion. By the time you get to an intermediate level of mastery of the guitar, or of any melodic instrument, you will be working with sequences almost daily. They are part of everyone’s practice routine. Sequences have a feel because they are connected with an underlying rhythm. The repetitive nature of the sequence builds anticipation and expectation. And because they are musical, we as musicians working towards mastery will practice them for much longer than just stepping through the scales by themselves. But here’s an interesting point: almost nobody practices 5-notes-to-the-beat sequences. We play scales and ladders in quarter-notes and triplets. We work up to sixteenth-notes…and then skip straight to sextuplets. Quintuplets are rarely part of how we think and practice and play. If we don’t think about it, we don’t practice it. And if we don’t practice something, we don’t master it. And if we don’t have it mastered, we aren’t going to pull it out of our Mojo bag to play for our audience. As a result, modern music has this big quintuplet-shaped hole in it because we all should have been practicing our futtuplets.

That’s where our fun begins!

This series is going to change your thinking, update your practicing, and revolutionize your playing. (My editor tells me not to overpromise, but I convinced her it was okay after I told her I would buy her daughter a pony.)