Once the Red Pattern scales are comfortable time should be spent with the Blue Pattern before the scales are done. Once you can comfortably switch between the two in the following ways you can start the Blue scales.

Starting the Low Second Finger

The Blue Pattern introduces the low 2nd finger. This should be done early because many method books keep people in the Red Pattern for a long time, to the point that it becomes hard to do anything else. Starting the Blue Pattern early in your playing will help make you more versatile later.

Blue Pattern Scales

The Red Pattern scales all start on the open strings. The Blue ones start on the 3rd finger. This means that we need three strings to play all eight notes. The top note will be the new low 2nd finger. This is a good opportunity for ear training, because the scale will sound very wrong if that 2nd finger is allowed to slip back to the Red Pattern.

How to Play the C Major Scale

C Major is our first Blue scale. To start with we’ll do the same thing we did with D Major and focus just on the ascending half of the scale. Sometimes stopping in the right place can be an issue, so do this until you really absorb where the top of the scale is, in this case the 2nd finger on the A string.

Once that’s comfortable add the descending half of the scale. Remember to play the 4th finger on A and D instead of the open strings. This should be easier than it was with the D Major as long as you have been consistently playing the other scales this way.

While you play the scale keep the hand in the Blue Pattern at all times by keeping the 2nd finger next to the 1st even when those fingers are not down. The hand often wants to stay in Red Pattern, especially when the fingers are lifted off of the string, and the chances of you playing a wrong note are higher if the hand does not break this habit.

The C Major Arpeggio

Remember the formula for arpeggios we talked about on the Red Scales; skip, skip, tonic. So we start with 3rd finger on the G string, which is our low tonic C. Then skip up, which will put us on 1st finger E. Then another skip to 3rd finger G. Then the leap to the high tonic C on 2nd finger.

This allows us to cover the general structure and trick for arpeggios. For upper strings all arpeggios have a common structure; every other note is related to each other. The first and third notes (in this case C and G) will be the same finger. For Blue that’s 3rd, for Reds it was our open strings. Then the second and fourth notes (E and the high C) will be a step apart across strings, so 1st to 2nd for Blue, while it was 2nd and 3rd for the Reds. Remember this when we more on to the next sets of arpeggios.

How to Play the High G Major Scale

The second Blue Pattern scale is a new octave of G Major. It begins on the 3rd finger on the D string, and goes to 2nd finger on E. Here we can do the same thing we did with the movement from D Major to A Major in the Red scales; play the same fingering and such as C Major, but start on the D string, and you’ll be playing this new G Major scale.

How to Play the Two Octave G Major Scale

Now that we’ve learned two different octaves of G Major, we can combine them into our first two octave scale. To make a two octave scale we just play the two octaves one after the other, stacking the different colors on top of each other. The 3rd finger G on D will be what I call the “Pivot Note” because it is the top of the first octave and the bottom of the second. Sometimes people want to play this note twice, which is why I mention it. Think of it like a Venn Diagram with the one note in the intersection of the circles.

For this scale you can think of each string by color (Red, Red, Blue, Blue). Also notice that the scale has what are referred to as turns at the top and bottom. This is to help some bowing things we add later. At this point I tell my students to default to the two octave scale, and rarely ask for the one octaves in isolation again.

I usually stay with just the Red and Blue scales for a while before we introduce the next pattern (Yellow). In the Suzuki book timeline I usually do the Blue Pattern around Go Tell Aunt Rhody and start the Yellow Pattern around Etude. So make sure the Red and Blue scales are nice and solid to prepare for the next steps.

Learning the Blue Scales: Starting on the 3rd Finger