Hi Friend!
Understanding the layout of the fretboard is essential if you want to master the guitar. In this issue you’ll learn why the emergent patterns of the fretboard are a uniquely beneficial trait of the guitar, and how to practice them so you can have greater mastery over your instrument.
Something To Think About
Everything is a shape
The guitar is key agnostic. By this I mean that as a guitarist the key you’re playing in has very little impact on how you play. If you learn a C chord with a certain fingering you can use that same fingering to play a G chord if you put it the right place. Similarly if you learn a lick in the key of Em you can literally play the same thing in the key of Gm if you move it up three frets.
This is a feature of the guitar and it’s one of the best things about the instrument (it’s why capos work and capos are a life saver!). It means that you don’t have to practice in all 12 keys like saxophone or piano players. Instead you can learn an idea in one key and then learn how to move that thing around to fit whatever key you happen to be playing in.
You might already know the above but the truth is that this concept has much deeper implications about the instrument. It tells us that the fretboard has repeatable patterns and symmetry. If you deeply you understand how chords, scales, and musical ideas are laid out on the fretboard you will have the freedom to navigate it with ease. This is because everything you play relates back to a core concept such as a scale, chord, or arpeggio which in turn relates back to a distinct shape that will work regardless of the key you’re in.
On the guitar everything is a shape. If you can spot how what you’re playing relates to it’s fundamental shape you’ve just deepened your understanding of it and made it easier to reuse and relate to in other situations. This will help you learn songs faster and make it easier for you to solo/improvise. Understanding the guitars fretboard is a meta-skill that supports literally everything else you do.
The benefits of understanding the layout of an instrument are so immense that when I started learning saxophone I naively assumed that it would also have some kind of meta-pattern to it’s layout that would make learning easier. Nope! Instead I wasted a week and had to learn 12 major different major scale fingerings. The saxophone has it’s own patterns, but it is not key agnostic like the guitar. This only increased my appreciation for the elegance of the guitar’s layout.
All this isn’t to say that the guitar is perfect. The tuning of the B string is pitfall that throws off many of the patterns on the fretboard and makes the initial steps towards learning to visualise the fretboard more difficult. Some guitarists like Alex Hutchings and Tom Quayle retune their B and E strings to a C and F respectively to overcome this. In doing so they sacrifice their ability to play tradition open chords in favour of having totally symmetry across the strings. Neither tuning is better, it just depends on your use case.
The longer you play the more relationships and patterns within the fretboard you’ll discover. It’s still revealing secrets to me after nearly 25 years of playing. Which tells me there’s probably more secrets to come if you keep looking.
Something To Practice
Start mapping the fretboard
To start taking advantage of the shape based nature of the guitar you need to build a map of the fretboard. There are however a few foundational bits of information you need to have in place in order to do this.
The first is knowing the notes on the fretboard. In particular the lowest two strings. If you don’t know this already I’m releasing a short video on how to learn them on Tuesday. Make sure you’re following me on Youtube, Instagram, or TikTok so you don’t miss it.
Once you can do this you can get started with the CAGED system. You should start by learning to map the basic major chords like I do in this video. After which you can learn how to map other chords, and scales. You can use this free lesson pack to get started. It’ll show you how the CAGED system works and how to apply it to chords, scales and arpeggios.
Something To Enjoy
From head to hands
Sicilian virtuoso Matteo Mancuso explains why having a solid understanding of the guitars fretboard is crucial if you want to be able to play fluidly. I’m pretty sure he knows the fretboard like the back of his hand!
That’s it for this one. Good luck with your exploration of the fretboard, if you have any questions about how to practice this just reply to this email!
See you in two weeks!
Alasdair 🤘
