Methodical Chaos: Navigating the Fretboard

Hello again, hope you all are having very happy holidays.

Today we will explore different approaches to learning the fretboard. Using these methods, you will be able to learn every note on the neck, play every scale up and down the neck, and use arpeggios to improvise effectively. Not only that, but we will structure our practice in a way where we are constantly learning new things every day so that we do not get bored and complacent.

We're going to use a special tool to accomplish this. Besides your guitar, you are going to need... flashcards. Yes, flashcards. If you are reading this, you must have a computer, so I would recommend getting flashcards for your computer; enter Anki.

Without turning this article into an advertisement, I will summarize the benefits of using Anki versus traditional flashcards; you can sync them on all your devices so you can bring them anywhere and the program filters which cards have become easy for you using your feedback so that you can work efficiently by not spending as much time on things that you have already mastered. I personally use these cards to learn things all the time. Did I mention it is free? That said, let us continue.

Memorizing the notes on the neck is probably one of the best things you could do to help you understand harmony and melody as they pertain to the guitar. It is also something that most people shy away from. This is different from most instruments, where music is taught using standard notation instead of guitar tabs. In comparison though, a twenty-two fret guitar contains one-hundred-and-thirty-eight notes. That is a bit more than your typical drum kit. The layout of these notes is not as intuitive as, say, a piano, either.

We are going to use flashcards to memorize these notes cold. By "cold," I mean you do not have to think about it, you just know the note. You probably already know some of them cold - at least the notes on the low E and A strings, because that's how you know what barre chord you are playing. Right? If you know what an octave is, you can probably come up with the notes on the D and G strings too (hint: just move the notes of the E and A strings up two frets to get the notes for D and G respectively), and if you know the notes on the low E string, you know the high E string. This leaves us with just the B string to memorize, really.  

Even if you followed me through that last paragraph, you can still get something out of this deck. Knowing them in the manner just described is not the same as knowing them cold. If you already took my advice and downloaded Anki, you can click the link below to view and downloaded the deck I have designed for memorizing the notes of the fretboard.

Anki Flashcard Deck: Note Location

If you have a smartphone, you can use this to practice for a few minutes anywhere, whether you're waiting for the bus, riding the train, on the john, whatever you want. If you want to maximize the effect of these cards, you should do them with your guitar in hand and simultaneously sing and play each note. Singing the notes will help you internalize them. By using the cards in this manner, you can memorize the notes, train your voice, become more comfortable with singing and playing, as well as develop your ear all at once. If your living situation doesn't allow you to sing them, you will still benefit from practicing with just your guitar.

I also mentioned scales and arpeggios earlier. If you haven't already guessed it, yes, we are going to use flashcards again! If you aren't already familiar with it, CAGED theory for guitar would be useful to know here. If you don't know CAGED, I will briefly summarize it for you; there are at least five different two-octave shapes (called forms, i.e. C form, A form, G form, etc.) that you can use to play any scale, chord, or arpeggio up and down the neck. I could write an entirely separate article about CAGED theory and probably will at some point, but for the time being you can find this information almost anywhere on the internet.

Anki Flashcard Deck: Scales

Anki Flashcard Deck: Arpeggios

We're going to do more than memorize these CAGED forms, though. Like before, there is a certain way you should use these cards. First, decide how long you want to spend in each area -- for some of you that are just starting out, you might want to spend fifteen minutes a day on scales. For those of you that are already very comfortable with pentatonic and diatonic scales it may be wise to spend more time on arpeggios. Either way, decide how much time you want to spend on each area based on what is going to benefit you the most, then adjust as you progress.

For teaching purposes, let us pretend you decided to spend ten minutes a day on scales. Starting with scales, you bust out your flashcards and randomly pick one of the scale forms. Next, you would practice playing that scale form, but not just mindlessly playing up and down the scale. That will not help you make music. Instead, we're going to take the same approach we took with technique assimilation, except this time we are going to limit which notes we can play with instead of which techniques we can play with.

Start up a backing track and improvise using that scale form for ten minutes.  As far as where you use the scale form on the neck, that's going to depend on what key your backing track is in as well as what chords you are playing over. The flash cards I have created identify the root notes of each form with a circle. Assuming you have begun memorizing the location of the notes on the fretboard, you should be able to construct these forms in the appropriate position on the fretboard.

For those of you that are more advanced when it comes to music theory, you may already know that you can use different scales to play over chord progressions aside from the "home key" by building the appropriate scale off of the root note of the chord. I would encourage you to do that as you improvise here.

You can improvise using just a few notes at a time and get a feel for how they sound over different chord progressions or you can also practice the entire scale form using different melodic and iterative ideas. For those of you unfamiliar with those expressions, a melodic idea would be to play the scale in thirds, fourths, fifths, etc. An iterative idea would be to play each note twice before moving on to the next one, to play two notes ascending and then one descending, to play the scale form in groups of three notes, etc. Use them as you see fit to make music and experiment with the sound of each scale.

This process can also be duplicated for arpeggios, although you will not really be able to use as many melodic ideas since an arpeggio is a melodic idea in itself. For those of you competent with tapping techniques, tapping the identical arpeggio form a perfect fourth or fifth higher with your right hand and pulling off to the actual arpeggio you are fretting with your left hand is certainly worth practicing. You can also feel free to use all of the iterative ideas you could come up with for scales on your arpeggios as well.

Also, for those of you that are more proficient with arpeggios, you could try to follow the chord progression using the given arpeggio form. If the chord progression changes to a different type of chord (i.e. you are practicing minor seventh arpeggios and the progression moves to a major seventh) you could use chord substitution to continue playing along to the progression. If you don't know what that is, don't worry about it for now as that is another topic I could write a separate article on.

Like I said before, how much you use these depends on how much they will benefit you. If you are really weak with the note locations, you may want to spend upwards of ten minutes a day with that deck until you are more comfortable with them. If you already know them pretty well, maybe five minutes a day is more appropriate. In either case, consistency is key, so make sure you pick a realistic goal. Practicing your scales and arpeggios for ten minutes each every day can yield fantastic results in just a few short weeks.

As an end note, I would also encourage those of you who went ahead and used these Anki decks I have created to explore the customization options offered by the Anki software and feel free to add to the deck as you see fit. Our next article will cover chord construction using similar methods, so check back soon.

This article is the intellectual property of onelightminute@gmail.com, but this information may be freely shared and published so long as the source is acknowledged.