Monday, January 23, 2012


Fretboard Map

Sick and tired of playing "the same old thing?"

Master the guitar fretboard and unleash your creativity!

To master the fretboard, you need to trace out a map of what's in it: the guitar fretboard map.

Many a guitar student thinks, mistakenly, that learning the names of all the notes on the fretboard is enough. Nothing could be farther from the truth. What you actually need to understand is all therelationships between those notes. It's not the notes, it's what you can do with them.
Many a guitar student makes the mistake of looking for shortcuts that don't lead to an understanding of the big picture: they go straight to learning scale and chord fingering patterns, without understanding how they can be broken down. Without understanding their components and inter-relationships...

Is that you? Have you tried that, only to find yourself in a rut?

To go back to the fretboard map analogy, only learning fingering patterns is the equivalent of learning fixed routes to move around a city, without a bird's eye view of all the surrounding terrain. If that's you, you're missing out on all the alternate routes you could take in different situations...
To get a full bird's eye view of the terrain -the guitar fretboard.

Feeling Lost?
If you've ever felt like you're trapped playing "the same old thing", and can't get to the sounds in your head, you're not alone! I've been through that, and most guitar players I talk to tell the same thing...
Actually, it's pretty much like being lost in an unknown city, without a map. You know where you want to go, you just don't know how.
So let's take the fretboard map analogy one step further. Just for the hell of it. Let's imagine you have only just moved towns. You get there by train, and you have directions to get to your new house. So you walk there, moving slowly, trying to take in every detail of every building along the way.
(This is you, clumsily doddering over the fretboard, trying to learn your first pentatonic scale).
You take a mental note of easy-to-remember buildings, monuments, and streets. With these reference points, you find it's not so hard getting back to the train station when you have to go there the next day...
(Hey, you're getting good!)
By now, you know the way to the train station and back to your new home. You next follow a similar procedure to learn the way to the grocery store. So you get really good at going from your house to the grocery store and back. And you're also great at getting to the train station and back. You think you really know your way around, and you've only been here for two days! Wow!!! Time to pat yourself on the back, innit?!
(At this stage, you know a couple of pentatonic scales and play them up and down, top speed, whenever your friends are around. The unitiated are impressed).
Then, one day, you're at you are at the grocery store. You get an urgent call: you have to go to the trains station, and catch the first train to solve some urgent matter in another town. At first, you feel confident. After all, you already know your way around town. So you pay and rush out, only to realize you don't know which way to turn. If you go all the way back home, so you can find your way to the station, you'll be late. So you bravely decide to try to find your way to the station from the grocery store...

it's not the notes, it's what you can do with them

You walk in what what you assume to be the right direction. But the winding streets soon confuse you. You walk around for two hours, and then finally, as if by mere chance, you spot the train station in the distance. You get there, exhausted, only to find your train has left....
(This is when your more experienced friends invite you over to jam with them, and all you know is your two pentatonic patterns. The initiated are very un-impressed).

"What has all that got to do with the fretboard, anyway?"

Ok... that is a long winded way of putting it, but it's clear enough: in order to really master the fretboard, you need to be able to get to any point from any point. Just knowing a couple of scales and chord patterns is very much like knowing the way to the grocery store and back, but little else.
You might even be at the point where you know a million different specific "routes" that get you to all your favorite places (a.k.a. fingering patterns). But what the hero of our story (You???!) hasn't found out is that the grocery store and the train station are only a block away(!!!).
What you need is a map, a fretboard map with which to get a view of the complete terrain -the guitar fretboard.
If, on the other hand you had a good map, with coordinates and all, you'd find out that moving around the fretboard is not so hard. You could now have accurate reference points to help you remember where all your favorite spots are, and the shortest possible routes between them all. And you could then start exploring alternate routes. Maybe you discover an awesome scenic route with an amazing landscape. A lick or riff you never even thought you could have come up with before...

Or you might discover an amazingly quick route for when you are right in the middle of a traffic jam (jam session with your pro friends) and need a practical solution to an unforeseen situation (someone plays something and you didn't see it coming).
Time to go get a fretboard map, right?! But, hey, why not a GPS, while you're at it?
Find out how to internalize the fretboard to the point you never have to think about it again.

5 key elements of music, and the guitar fretboard


  • Major and minor triad
  • Major and minor pentatonic scales
  • Major and minor diatonic scales
  • Modes
  • Chromatic scales

  • If you think of these essential building blocks of music as fingering patterns, you won't understand the relationships between them. You'll end up learning each individually. If you take into account all the possible permutations of these 5 things, on the fretboard, it's a huge task!!! Moreover, this is the equivalent of the map confusion we've just described.


                      

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