In this paragraph we will discuss about the concept of Vertical Shapes on guitar, focusing on major scale vertical shapes .

William Leavitt in the seventies introduced the concept of  Vertical Shapes, on the guitar fretboard, for scales and arpeggios. Vertical shapes allow guitarists to play any scale or arpeggio, in a five fret area, without shifting the hand.

As a result, for a given scale or  arpeggio we can obtain twelve shapes, five frets wide, one for each guitar fret.

In the picture above, for example, are shown the twelve major scale shapes visualized by scales degrees.

As you can notice many shapes contain repeated notes on the 2nd and 3rd strings, so that we can obtain two different set of diagrams. 

Here we have twelve shapes obtained removing repeated notes from the 2nd string.

And here we have twelve shapes obtained removing repeated notes from the 3rd string.

In conclusion, the following video shows how automatically obtain scales and arpeggios Vertical Shapes with guitarLayers.
GuitarLayers can generate automatically Vertical Shapes for the common scales and arpeggios but, more powerful, for any user-defined custom scale or arpeggio.
Moreover GuitarLayers library contains pre-compiled diagrams with the vertical shapes of the most used scales.
All diagrams on this article are obtained automatically with guitarLayers.