Everybody wants to sound like Motown, Curtis Mayfield, or a country session player who charges by the second — and it turns out the secret is embarrassingly cheap: it's just two notes with a string politely skipped in between. That's a sixth, and it's the warmest, sweetest interval you can play without anyone accusing you of trying too hard.
This clip is Exercise #5 in my voice-leading series: sixths played as a melody and cycled around the circle of fourths. It's a focused study for playing sixth intervals smoothly across the whole neck and drilling that open, honeyed sound into your ear until you can't unhear it. If you're still fuzzy on what an interval even is, start there — then come back and let me ruin every other interval for you.
How playing sixths on guitar actually works
A sixth comes in two flavours: the major sixth (nine semitones) and the minor sixth (eight). On guitar you almost always play them as a double stop on a string pair that skips the string in between — think the G and high E strings, or the D and B strings — which is why they ring so open and un-muddy. Here's the nerdy punchline: a sixth is just an upside-down third. Flip a minor third over and you get a major sixth; that's the complementary interval doing its quiet magic, and it's why sixths feel so consonant and singable.
The real skill this exercise trains isn't the shape, it's the movement. As you cycle around the circle of fourths, don't jump — glide. Keep both voices on the same string pair and always reach for the nearest available note, so the top line and the bottom line each step by the smallest possible distance. That's voice leading in one sentence: laziness, but elegant. Do it slowly, watch how little your hand actually moves, and your ear will start predicting the next sixth before your fingers get there.
Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file, put on your smoothest imaginary suit, and go make two notes sound like a horn section. If you want the tab, the slow-motion breakdown, and every other exercise in the series without me guilt-tripping you, it's all waiting on my Patreon.