The chromatic scale
Every scale you will ever play fits inside one six-fret window: four fingers over the middle four frets, index and pinky sliding out to the ones on the ends. These two exercises park your hand in that window and teach the discipline itself — first low on the neck where the open strings help, then anywhere you like.
Every note, six frets, four fingers
The chromatic scale skips nothing. It is every note there is, in order, which makes it useless as a melody and close to perfect as an exercise. There is no key to it and no root worth naming, because starting anywhere gives you the same twelve notes in the same order.
What it does teach is the hand position everything else on this site is played in: a window of six consecutive frets, one finger over each of the middle four, with the index sliding back for the lowest fret and the pinky forward for the highest. Your hand stays where it is through all of it. Climbing every note on every string is the shortest way to find out whether each finger really owns its own fret, because the moment one drifts or flattens onto its neighbour you hear it.
Once that window is steady, the major scale patterns are the same hand position with most of the dots removed.
The two exercises
They look like one exercise done twice and they are not. Where the window sits changes what you have to do: at the bottom of the neck the open strings and the nut hold your place for you, and anywhere else nothing does.
At the nut open strings up to fret 5
Your hand covers a six-fret window, a finger resting over each of the middle four frets, and here the window sits at the very bottom of the neck, so the open strings do the lowest fret’s work for free. Climb every note on every string in order, one note per beat, and let each ring clean before the next. The exercise isn’t the notes — it’s the discipline of every finger staying over its own fret. If a finger drifts or flattens, slow the tempo down until it doesn’t.
Anywhere on the neck
The same climb, but now the window floats: park your hand anywhere on the neck and start — the app follows from the first note you play. Moving the window changes which notes sound, never which finger plays them, and feeling that is the whole point. Pick a different spot each run. Wherever you land, keep each finger over its own fret from the first note to the last, sliding only for the two on the ends.
The second chart carries no fret number on purpose. There is nothing to tell you, and that absence is the lesson: the shape is the same wherever you park it, and the notes it produces are whatever the frets under it happen to be.