Navigating by double stops

Double stops generally means playing two notes at once on two adjacent strings courses. When I first learned about double stops, the focus was on playing harmonized melodies. But in time, I recognized in a lot of my playing that double stop positions were something I frequently used as a navigation tool for playing in any key.

I’m going to try to explain that in more detail in subsequent articles.

The goal is to understand how we can use double stop postitions as a navigation aid for playing in various keys. We will look at an approach for finding anchor fingerings for playing in different keys and how these positions can be used to play at one position on the neck, or how to navigate to a neighboring position as needed to express our melodic ideas.

Along the way, we’ll need to detour a little bit into chord theory and discuss scales and intervals.