Doing exercises in all keys

In your opinion, if running through exercises, it is really necessary to practice them in all keys? I understand that the standard educator response is "yes," but I was recently working through Jerry Coker's "Patterns for Jazz" and a lot of the patterns weren't terribly useful because they just involved half-step increments. Where this might be a challenge for a horn player, for guitar, it's usually just a one-fret shift.

Looked at another way, if it were that useful, then all of the thinking around CAGED would have never come about.

Thoughts? Thanks.

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Hello,

Nice question.

I think on the guitar, the answer lies within playing the *same* pattern (same key) in many different fingerings.

Is just the opposite of saxophone and piano.

Playing a simple pattern in C major, you could easily find a dozen fingerings (including octave transposition) on the guitar.

Then it is useful to employ the exact same fingering and play that pattern in all keys (just to link the keys to frets locations on the instrument.) It might be "dull" to go up or down by half-step, so try different cycles.

I hope this helps,
Marc-Andre Seguin