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Nicolas Slonimsky’s Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns has been cited by creative musicians as different as Arnold Schoenberg, John Coltrane, Frank Zappa and Buckethead as a source of advanced material for the construction of melodic lines and dizzying solo patterns. Yet it’s a pretty difficult book for the average guitarist to get into, and it definitely wasn’t designed with the instrument in mind. It’s fair to say that it’s more often talked about than read, and a lot of musicians have a copy on their shelves with which they’ve made very little progress.

This book has two aims. The first is to present the main idea behind the firsttwelve chapters of Slonimsky’s book in a way that’s accessible and logical for the modern musician. The second is to present some patterns based on this idea in both standard notation and guitar tablature, organized according, not to Slonimsky’s rather abstract octave divisions, but to note-content, a far more useful method for most purposes. The patterns presented here are different from those in the Thesaurus, which this book aims to supplement.

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