How To MEMORIZE Your Guitar FRETBOARD: The No-Nonsense Exercise That Actually Works

RVA said:
Allow me to elaborate. When you put your finger down on the fretboard, it makes a note. Each note has a name. This helps you remember the name.

People who do not remember names use words like "buddy", or "man" or "miss", which I guess is also an option
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Dude,

I try so hard to absorb this stuff....but it just confuses me.
 
Robert Herndon said:
Dude,

I try so hard to absorb this stuff....but it just confuses me.
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If I were just learning today, I’d probably be confused, too!

I learned the notes of the fretboard thirty-five years ago, before YouTube or the Internet were there to “help” me.

I used...a book. It wasn’t even a guitar book. It was a book on beginning music theory that I borrowed from someone.

Then, I played songs in standard musical notation to reinforce the learning. I also avoided tablature as much as possible.

Hang on for a second...I gotta go yell at some kids to get off my lawn...
 
smitty_p said:
If I were just learning today, I’d probably be confused, too!

I learned the notes of the fretboard thirty-five years ago, before YouTube or the Internet were there to “help” me.

I used...a book. It wasn’t even a guitar book. It was a book on beginning music theory that I borrowed from someone.

Then, I played songs in standard musical notation to reinforce the learning. I also avoided tablature as much as possible.

Hang on for a second...I gotta go yell at some kids to get off my lawn...
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With me, its a funny thing. I can hear a chord progression and know where to go on the neck for a solo over that progression, but I cannot tell you every note, at each and every place on the neck.

Every time I sit down and try to absorb some of these things, I find it so distracting to my actual playing, that I wander off into the fields of music.

I leave that stuff to the "Educateable" musicians.
 
Robert Herndon said:
With me, its a funny thing. I can hear a chord progression and know where to go on the neck for a solo over that progression, but I cannot tell you every note, at each and every place on the neck.

Every time I sit down and try to absorb some of these things, I find it so distracting to my actual playing, that I wander off into the fields of music.

I leave that stuff to the "Educateable" musicians.
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I have not been so fortunate. I find that I need to learn a structure other than scales in order to solo over chord changes. As a result, I started getting more familiar with chord shapes (CAGED), intervals and triads. When I saw this video, it made me realize that knowing all the notes would make the task of locating shapes and notes (and thereby intervals) immeasurably easier and quicker.
 
RVA said:
I have not been so fortunate. I find that I need to learn a structure other than scales in order to solo over chord changes. As a result, I started getting more familiar with chord shapes (CAGED), intervals and triads. When I saw this video, it made me realize that knowing all the notes would make the task of locating shapes and notes (and thereby intervals) immeasurably easier and quicker.
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I certainly don't think of myself as fortunate. I rather wish I was educatable.
 
Lately, I have been listening to my improvised solos and finding them quite boring and predictable. I tend to stay rooted in the pentatonic shapes, because that was where I started from.

I would suggest this improvised solo (that I recorded for my cover of Whitesnake's Fool For Your Lovin") is evidence of my lack of finesse and imagination in solo composition:


What i see and hear is a "ham-fisted" technique along with a overtly blues-based solo, lacking both wonder and imagination.

In consideration of this, I have began a self-study of Yngwie's use of modes. I am beginning to incorporate more of these shapes into my daily practice routine.

Rather than trying to play with more finesse, which i think for me is an impossibility, i am instead just using more of Yngwie's classically styled shapes to alter my "voice" so to speak.

I am spending 2 hours each morning on learning and apply new Yngwie links, wrapping up each session with an improvised jam over a 100 bpm Yngwie backing track.

I feel like this is helping me more than anything else I have tried.
 
I started learning the fretboard once, using a book. It messed me up. Since I'm a self-taught player, starting to learn what the notes were made me start thinking about what the notes were instead of just instinctively playing, and it made my playing hesitant-sounding and frankly a bit predictable. I tossed the book, tried not to think about it, and went back to my blissful ignorance. Like Robert, since I (and I suspect a lot of us) learned to play by ear in the age before the internet or even great written resources for Rock music, I learned to hear the root and follow - I can almost always nail the first 3/4+ chords of any song by ear after listening through the first stanza, often even just a few notes for simple stuff. In the old gigging days when we were playing covers and I was in-practice we could easily learn 3 or 4 songs in an afternoon, then I'd go home to learn the solos...or sometimes I'd just learn the first bit of the solo verbatim and then wank away for the rest, nobody ever cared, haha.
 
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