05/01/2026
Triads are the building blocks of everything, but practicing them in "blocks" can sound robotic. My favourite way to open up the neck is using Spread Triads. By opening up the voicing, you instantly sound more pianistic and melodic.
Instead of stacking the notes close together (like a standard barre chord), we spread them out to cover more of the frequency range.
Combine this with hybrid picking and you get a more fluid, cascading sound. Normally we tend to practice inversions on one string set, up and down the neck, but playing vertically makes them more useful and applying them to a chord progression makes them so much more interesting, and you tend to remember them more too.
Visualise them around a scale shape to use them as a spring board for moving around in improvisation.
1Take a simple progression: C - G- Bb - Am
2 Play it using Spread Triads (Root-5th-3rd)
3 Cycle through all 3 inversions across the string sets. (R53/3R5/53R)
Creative practice makes creative players.
