Fretboard Knowledge A discussion

tonyrath

Knowing the notes on the board is to me part of being a player. Playing by pattern or shape is fine as a starter but for the musician/guitarist who wants to develop their playing 1 You must here first what you are going to play 

2 Know what notes you are going to play and 3 Know where you are going to play to get the best sound on the fretboard  

This is NOT the same as reading music - its knowing where notes and what they sound like 

Typical teacher bollocks - possibly but beyond a certain point it is the only way to improve 

Grunfeld

I agree Tony.  For what it's worth a teacher I know doesn't take students on unless they know all the notes on the fretboard.  That's his basic starting position just because his preference is to teach not-total-beginners.  Knowing the notes just makes communicating so much easier -- it's that communication which is easier if you've got the right language.

Barney

tonyrath said:

Knowing the notes on the board is to me part of being a player. Playing by pattern or shape is fine as a starter but for the musician/guitarist who wants to develop their playing 1 You must here first what you are going to play 

2 Know what notes you are going to play and 3 Know where you are going to play to get the best sound on the fretboard  

This is NOT the same as reading music - its knowing where notes and what they sound like 

Typical teacher bollocks - possibly but beyond a certain point it is the only way to improve 

yes i think thats definitely the case..i think its also important to learn on each individual string horizontally than across them....in that way you can see things more clearly and you get less of a pattern player..

tonyrath

Yep totally agree with that 

mike_l

Agreed.

I know the note names, across the board, when I'm at home practising/playing, but in a jam/live situation my mind goes a bit blank and I tend to forget them,

frankus

I think it's a matter of familiarity which is in turn a matter of frequency of use. It's really only an issue for improvisation it speeds up learning tunes but is not a barrier to feeling the music or participating in making music - to think it is to highlight the lofty thinking of a person living in the ivory towers of musical authenticity - whilst the rest of us toil below for "lesser" reasons.

I know the notes given time (too much to my mind), I definitely know patterns are not the answer but I get absolutely f*ck all time to play the guitar from month to month - it is very frustrating... but I guess that's my problem - not those wanting to differentiate what other people do (a very worthy cause, I'm sure).

I'll have to add the "not a player" label to my list of frustrations, although I think it's only fair to say the pain of owning that label is insignificant compared to the absence of playing any kind of music with other people.

Bellycaster

tonyrath said:

Knowing the notes on the board is to me part of being a player. Playing by pattern or shape is fine as a starter but for the musician/guitarist who wants to develop their playing 1 You must here first what you are going to play 

2 Know what notes you are going to play and 3 Know where you are going to play to get the best sound on the fretboard  

This is NOT the same as reading music - its knowing where notes and what they sound like 

Typical teacher bollocks - possibly but beyond a certain point it is the only way to improve 

 

@tonyrath

 

I understand what you are saying here and am hoping to reach that stage eventually, but there are some things I want to put to you.

 

Agreed, knowing/seeing the note names is obviously better than just knowing the patterns and positions of the scales alone etc. But that doesn't mean you can't make music by knowing the patterns alone. I know you didn't say "you can't make music" but here are my thoughts.

 

Patterns and positions can still be useful through familiarization. If someone played around the Pentatonics and Major Scale positions constanly in their repertoire, that person would know what their phrases were going to sound like before they played them because they will have used them countless times and may never have bothered to really remember the note names.

 

That's not to say that person wont experiment with new phrases, but by remembering how they sound and becoming savy at hearing the backing.

 

If you play to backing tracks like I do, I can stay in key and sound very musical and resolve to the right notes etc, but I can't process all the information that quick yet, so I tend to trust my ear and past experience. I know which notes not to land on though.

 

I can name all the notes within maybe 1.5 seconds but not at the same speed as I'm playing them or to put it better, I can't visualise all the note names superimposed on the fretboard that quick . 

 

This leads to what I wanted to put to you about the difference of Improvising a solo and actually constructing one for a song. Constructing a solo, a person of my limited ability could study the chord prog better and use the chord tones etc and come up with the best solo I can muster. But I tend to think there is a lot to said for just immersing yourself into the backing and flowing with it.

 

I want to reach the "Knowing the notes quick" goal eventually for when I want to start improvising over Jazz progs, it becomes a whole new ball game with Jazz. It's way more important to see the chord tones and think ahead in that game. It's something to strive for, but not everyone on here(me included) may make it that far and it wont be through lack of trying. Everyday life tends to get in the way for a lot.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

tonyrath

As I say STARTING with a pattern is fine. The trouble is that too often what started off as a framework becomes a straitjacket. It happens on the piano with blues players. They get locked into certain note sequences and thats it. You learn stuff by rote or pattern and then you learn to go outside the pattern to create new ideas. It does not come easy and I would not pretend it does 

Clarky

is this about know where the notes are on the neck?

or

being able to hear the intervals before you play them?

ddlooping

Clarky said:

is this about know where the notes are on the neck?

or

being able to hear the intervals before you play them?

The latter, I agree.

mike_l

Clarky said:

is this about know where the notes are on the neck?

or

being able to hear the intervals before you play them?

Both..

Clarky

when playing scales and arps, singing / humming along with them seriously helps to make the connection between the neck and your aural perception

tonyrath

Agree with Clarky about humming or singing 

Clarky

I stumbled upon this 'singing what you play' thing when I was learning some George Benson licks as a kid..

then it kinda dawned on me that I was learning to finger the intervals I was singing...

from then on I realised that I'd started to develop a nice connection between the notes and lines in my head, and the fingerboard..

when I developed it more strongly I found that I could be nowhere near a guitar, hum a guitar lick in my head and mentally visualise the fingerings..

this is actually quite a powerful skill to develop..

nickp

interestingly (or not maybe) I'm doing both now (after all these years) and starting to learn how to play properly and fill in all those yawning gaps in my technique.

I'm learning the notes - one note a week using the ascending/descending patterns to find the same note and also by finding the highest and lowest of each note on each string.  

Also I'm properly learning the pentatonics in all 5 positions via a combination of straight scale repetition plus a load of various sequencing patterns through each position.

loads of benefits - my picking is really starting to improve, note clarity is improving as i'm concentrating on keeping noise down, timing as it is all (always) to a metronome, and the sounds in the scale are starting to become instinctive (as are the patterns).

I'm kind of assuming that all this graft will result in a decent improvement in my playing when it all comes together in an unspecified number of months time.

I'll also have to try clarky's humming thing as that must be next - although I'm really pissing off my wife with all this scale practice.

I haven't told her that I'm also practicing my 16th note strumming (muted at the mo) ready to foray into a bit of funk chordage and that has got to be irritating

Barney

Clarky;10692" said:

I stumbled upon this 'singing what you play' thing when I was learning some George Benson licks as a kid..then it kinda dawned on me that I was learning to finger the intervals I was singing...from then on I realised that I'd started to develop a nice connection between the notes and lines in my head, and the fingerboard..when I developed it more strongly I found that I could be nowhere near a guitar, hum a guitar lick in my head and mentally visualise the fingerings..this is actually quite a powerful skill to develop..

I can associate with this ...its something I do quite a lot especially learning solos... I can listen and pretty much know what I'm going to do before I pick the guitar up.... ...
Now here's the thing....are we singing or visualising what we already know..
So composing if you like away from the instrument... is it coming from our inner self or is it just something that we visualise on the fretboard and know what it supposed to sound like....

Iv listened a lot to George Benson scat singing and I get the feeling he is following is fingers and not the other way round...nothing wrong with it ...ithink its great ...but its a question of what came first....:)

viz

Yeah he's definitely singing what he's playing, not playing what he's singing, iykwim

Barney

So maybe jazz and other forms of improvisation arnt what we are led to believe...composition while playing....maybe its just things we already know put together in a pleasing way ...:)

Clarky

think of it like having a conversation..

when you're asking for a beer you know several ways of doing it..

you could completely improvise... but more like you're creating sentences from smaller often used phrases..

these phrases you can also of course modify ad-hoc..

soloing is really not much different..

you have essentially internalised a collection of licks / melody lines etc..

these essentially make up your phrases..

so does Benson sing what he plays or play what he sings??

I think the two happen together so one does not follow the other..

like with speaking, you just know what you want to say..

Clarky

here's a cool thing...

if you can sing chords as arpeggios, it seriously helps you to hear a piece of music and be able to understand the chords that you are hearing..

even if you don't know the key, you can determine if it's major or minor [or the mode used etc]

and then you can hear for example chord I, to IV, to VI maj7, to V9 etc...

it makes for a potent internal tool when it comes to learning songs..

and for composition.. eventually you can internally hear in polyphony.. 

I can be nowhere near an instrument.. but I can write melodies, put chords to them etc in my head..

and write it on anything available to me..

I wrote [and scored] the main sections to The Rape of the Sabine Women on napkins sat on platform C, London Bridge Station when my train was cancelled..

you can never tell or control when / where inspiration hits you..

and when it does, it's handy if you can capture it right there at the time..

Barney

I think a good exercise is to take any tune.....something that we all know but havnt played before like say happy birthday..could be any tune...pick a starting note...any on the fretboard and play the tune...then try another note ..different string and position ....play it again ...I think it gives a good judge to how well we know the fretboard rather than arps and stuff ...these are just repeating exercises that can easily be tinternalised...not saying we dint need them, we do just they are not a good example of how we connect with the instrument...