3 Note Per String Scales (3NPS)
3NPS — three notes per string — is one of the most widely used scale systems on the guitar. Players like Joe Satriani helped popularise it, and for good reason: the consistent three-notes-per-string layout makes scales predictable across the fretboard in a way other systems don’t. The picking patterns are uniform, the positions connect logically, and once the system clicks it’s fast.
The problem is the way it’s usually taught. Most 3NPS methods give you seven patterns per scale — one for each mode — and send you off to learn them all before anything becomes useful. That’s a long road before you’re actually playing.
This PDF takes a different approach. By streamlining both the patterns and the picking, it cuts the memory work dramatically — three scale patterns instead of seven, across thirteen scales, and one picking pattern in two directions. The same fretboard coverage, a third of the material.
Every diagram is labelled with intervals rather than note names, which is the part most scale books get wrong. A diagram with note names on it only works in one key, so you end up learning the picture instead of the pattern. With intervals you learn the shape once and move it anywhere.
Download the PDF →What’s inside
- Three patterns each for thirteen scales, major through to Hungarian minor, instead of the usual seven per scale
- A unified picking approach — one pattern in two directions — that works across every scale in the book
- Interval-labelled diagrams throughout, so each pattern moves to any key rather than working in only one
- A one-page table of which scale goes over which chord
- A fifteen-minute practice routine for getting the patterns down without losing your whole evening to them
- A genuine woodshed resource for building picking technique, speed, and fretboard fluency
What it isn’t
This isn’t a theory book and it doesn’t cover pentatonic scales. There’s no tab and no sheet music either — it’s a practical, pattern-focused system designed to be worked on in the practice room. The thinking has been done for you. Your job is to put the repetitions in.
The free PDF gets the scales under your fingers. What it doesn’t do is tell you what they’re made of. Thirteen scales with seven degrees each gives ninety-one chords, and that’s where most players stop — knowing a scale exists without ever finding out what’s inside it.
Count those ninety-one properly and there are only eleven shapes among them: seven seventh-chord types and four triads. 3NPS Scales, Chords and Arpeggios has all eleven as arpeggios and as playable voicings, shows you how to find them inside the patterns you already know, and includes harmony tables for every scale, degree by degree.
3NPS Scales, Chords and Arpeggios →