Chords with almost nothing happening in the left hand and everything happening in the ringing. One to three fingers each, open B and E strings doing the harmonic work. This is the Velvet Underground engine — and, moved to inner voices, it's also half of Landau's chord vocabulary.
The whole exercise in one sentence: barre your index across the D and G strings only, let B and E ring open, and move it. Two strings fretted, two strings droning. That's it. Everything below is a consequence of that one shape.
The usable frets are 0 · 2 · 4 · 5 · 7 · 9 · 12. That isn't arbitrary — it's the E natural minor scale spelled out along two strings, and the four dead frets are the notes outside the key. Knowing where the ladder breaks is as useful as knowing where it works. The clashes aren't unusable, they're just not this exercise; fret 10 in particular is a decent tension chord if you land on it deliberately.
Ascend 0 → 2 → 4 → 5 → 7 → 9 → 12, one bar each, strummed once and left to ring the full bar. Then descend. Do not touch the right hand again until the ring dies. The exercise is listening, not playing.
Same shape, non-adjacent moves: 0 → 7 → 2 → 9 → 5 → 0. Wide jumps stop it sounding like a scale exercise and start it sounding like a song. Slide into each position rather than lifting — the slide is part of the sound.
Once the ladder is automatic, shift the barre to the A and D strings and let G, B and E ring. Different intervals against the drone, same principle, and this is where it stops being VU and starts being Landau. Map which frets survive; it will be a different set.
Fixed voicings, all one to three fingers, all machine-verified. Cmaj9 and Em7 are single-finger chords and both are complete, correctly-spelled extended harmony. That gap between effort and result is the whole thesis of this pack.
Two bars each, arpeggiated with the fingers, no pick. Every chord contains an open B and E, so the top of the harmony never moves — only the bass and the inner voice do. That stationary top is why it sounds like one continuous thing rather than four chords.
Descending inner voice, ascending brightness. Hold each for four bars — far longer than feels comfortable. The discomfort of holding is the exercise; Reed's whole trick was refusing to move on schedule.
Fmaj7 is out of key against E minor and that's exactly why it works — a single half-step lift that lands somewhere unexpected and comes straight back. One chord of tension, no preparation, no apology.
Four chords, all of which you already know. The content isn't the progression — it's the suspension wiggle inside each chord, the pinky going on and off in tempo. That single gesture is most of Reed's rhythm identity.
All downstrokes. Quarter notes. No palm mute. No dynamics. On beats 2 and 4 of every bar, drop the suspension finger and lift it again. Do not vary it, do not get clever, do not add a fill. Play it for five minutes straight. The hypnosis only arrives after the boredom does — that's the actual lesson, and it's a hard one for a fusion player.
Play the engine with no click for three minutes, then start a metronome and see where you are. Reed's time pushes. If you've drifted slower you're playing it as an exercise; if you've drifted faster you're playing it as a song.
Drop the low E to D and the drone stops costing you a finger. Everything below rings a low D underneath regardless of what the upper voices do — this is Heroin and Venus in Furs territory, where the harmony barely moves and the momentum comes entirely from the right hand.
Start at about 60bpm, all downstrokes, and accelerate continuously across the whole loop until you physically can't hold it, then collapse back to 60 and start again. Two chords. The entire structure is tempo. Nothing in your fusion vocabulary prepares you for this and that's the point of doing it.
Every instinct from blues and fusion says control the ring. Do the opposite here. Let the previous chord bleed into the next one; the accidental overlaps between a dying Cmaj9 and an arriving Em7 are the sound. If a change sounds muddy, change more slowly rather than muting more.
This dies under gain — the open-string clusters turn to mush the moment you compress them. Badger 18 nearly clean, AC+ just tickling the front if you want any hair at all, Broadcast off. Drybel Vibe on slow for the Venus in Furs seasick thing. Reverb short and dark, not a cathedral — Reed's records are dry and close. If you want the wet Mesa in, keep the BigSky low and use the Mobius instead. Suhr S on the neck pickup is the right guitar; the Custom 24 is too hi-fi for this and cleans up the character you're after.
You spend your practice time on vocabulary and note choice. This pack has almost no notes in it. What it trains instead is duration, restraint, and right-hand consistency — holding a chord past the point of comfort, playing the same bar identically forty times, letting harmony arrive from open strings rather than from fingering. Those are the exact things fusion practice erodes. Twenty minutes of the ladder before a normal session, played slowly, will do more for your comping than another arpeggio drill.
The ladder generalises. Drone strings on the top two, fretted cluster on the inner two — that's this pack. Move the drone to the middle and the fretted pair to the outside and you're in Landau's chord world; his comping is largely open strings held against moving inner voices, which is the same device with more harmonic ambition. Learn it here where it's easy, then transplant it.