learning the fret board

here is the best and simplest lesson i know of

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_IL8zzDXwE

Keyboard? The helps are not needed, it is very easy :D

White keys are natural notes and the black ones are the sharps or flats. You'll see patterns with two black keys (block 2) and three black keys (block 3). The white key to the left of the "block 2" is C, the next D, the next E, the next F, and so on.

There aren't black keys between the E and F neither between the B and C.

Always it is the same. There are more or less blocks on depending on the number of octaves in the keyboard.

Thanks Bally that vid was !!awesome!!

I just spent the past few hours doing it and good god that made it really simple. I have been practicing scales a lot lately and found it difficult to know what key I was in....

will see tomorrow if it has really sunk in or not.

Cheers mate

And thanks to you Nuno, where else can i get a lesson about keyboards on a guitar forum:D(I hate when i make idiotic typos)

pleasure to help KS 8)

Hi,

It's good to have a general working knowledge of the neck, but I haven't yet found any real reason to know instantly what the name of any particular position is.

It's certainly handy to be able to find out reasonably quickly, but that's pretty easy anyway - just count up from the open E, A, D, G, B, E.

I found that when I had an actual reason for wanting to know - such as working a song out, or figuring out different spots to play a chord, how to alter a chord, or whatever, then it gave me a reason to know, and a tool for remembering. Once you start to use various parts of the neck you do build up a working knowledge of the bits you really want to know - just by using them. It always seemed more useful to me than just memorising the whole lot as some sort of party trick.

I've also found it very useful if I am trying to remember a cluster of positions to not just look at the names, but to actually play them and also sing the name out loud. Helps to remember them, helps your singing, and actually gives the whole exercise a bit more point.

Others may differ, but mostly I find that what I really want to know isn't just whether a particular note is an F#, or whatever - it's where its 'mates' next door are. So, for me, the exercise is not just about memorising the individual names of notes - it's probably more importantly about learning how the tuning and layout of a guitar affects the way the fingers move between sequences and patterns of notes.

Some people play scale patterns and say or sing the names, some prefer to look at chord tone patterns, or whatever. But whichever method you use it seems like a good idea to add a bit of value by using the time to learn several useful things at once. :)

Good luck.

Cheers,

Chris

And thanks to you Nuno, where else can i get a lesson about keyboards on a guitar forum:D(I hate when i make idiotic typos)
Ok! :lol:

I was surprised but sometimes we make "generic" questions! Sorry! :lol:

Ok, concerning to the Chris reply: "just count up from the open strings". Here there is a lesson... (after the last site arrange I do not find some things...): From Math to Music by Bruce Cyburt. He propose a scheme for memorizing the fretboard.

A number from 0 to 11 is assigned to each note (chormatic scale, from A to G#) and by means of arithmetic operations, all the notes in the fretboard can be determined. I don't use this technique, in fact I agree with Chris, but I read it some months ago and it seems interesting.

Nuno

And thanks to you Nuno, where else can i get a lesson about keyboards on a guitar forum:D(I hate when i make idiotic typos)
Ok! :lol:

I was surprised but sometimes we make "generic" questions! Sorry! :lol:

Ok, concerning to the Chris reply: "just count up from the open strings". Here there is a lesson... (after the last site arrange I do not find some things...): From Math to Music by Bruce Cyburt. He propose a scheme for memorizing the fretboard.

A number from 0 to 11 is assigned to each note (chormatic scale, from A to G#) and by means of arithmetic operations, all the notes in the fretboard can be determined. I don't use this technique, in fact I agree with Chris, but I read it some months ago and it seems interesting.

Nuno
WHOAH!.......maths too...you gotta be kidding :lol: :lol: :lol:

i just kinda played whatever until a kind of grid started showing up in my mind. there are a few of them now, and you can just remember where the roots or whatever are, and the rest comes naturally.

here is the best and simplest lesson i know of

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_IL8zzDXwE
WOw, I just watched a bucnh of his videos. Amazing.

It's certainly handy to be able to find out reasonably quickly, but that's pretty easy anyway - just count up from the open E, A, D, G, B, E.

Just to add something that makes that even quicker.

The neck pattern repeats exactly from the 12th fret (with the two dots) so the 12th is obviously also E,A,D,G,B,E. And because of the way the guitar is tuned, it doesn't take much work to spot that the notes at the 5th fret are A,D,G,C,E, A.

So if you know those (and most players pretty much know most of that already) then you're never more than 1, 2 or at the most 3 frets from the answer to any other position. Just count either up or back down a string from the ones you know.

But, as I said, knowing all the names in 'line order' is of fairly limited value. What you really want to know is how they relate to each other musically. And the best way to learn that is in the context of some real music - working out songs, chords, scale patterns for solos, or whatever it is you're really trying to get the hang of.

As jason brann said, after a while it just seems to fall into place naturally through usage.

It's good to have a general working knowledge of the neck, but I haven't yet found any real reason to know instantly what the name of any particular position is.

Well, when improvising it doesn't really work if you need a minute to figure out where the notes of a Bbdim are exactly, you'll need to know it. Maybe people differ but IMH experience improvising doesn't go nowhere unless I know what the backing is doing and where I can find those notes on the guitar.

Kaizer:

I learned the guitar ten years ago and the following site (one of the pioneers in the internet related of the guitar) has been really helpful to me in order to learn the fretboard. And yes, you have to know all the notes after all!!

Enjoy!

http://www.essentialguitar.com/

It's good to have a general working knowledge of the neck, but I haven't yet found any real reason to know instantly what the name of any particular position is.

Well, when improvising it doesn't really work if you need a minute to figure out where the notes of a Bbdim are exactly, you'll need to know it. Maybe people differ but IMH experience improvising doesn't go nowhere unless I know what the backing is doing and where I can find those notes on the guitar.

Exactly. That's why I say learn the fretboard with a purpose in mind, not just as a series of names in line along a string. I don't say that it's not necessary to know the note names, just that it's not usually necessary to know the name of all the positions instantly.

Maybe others differ, but if I want to find a bunch of notes quickly - and when I'm improvising I need to know how to find a hell of a lot of notes very quickly indeed - I don't mentally start reeling off note names and comparing them with a mental map of the whole fretboard. (Perhaps others do?)

Instead I use a different type of 'mental map'. This one tells me where notes are in relation to each other and relative to my starting point. If I start on any note I know what lies to the left and right, and above and below, musically speaking that is. I don't really even care all that much what they're called by that stage of the game, so long as I know where to find the important notes in my musical scheme.

Before I even started to learn to play the guitar I spent a fair bit of time staring at a map of the fretboard and highlighting various aspects and arrangements of notes - trying to understand why a guitar was laid out and tuned that way. What I learned gave me an understanding that I now find a lot more useful than just being able to point to a position and say 'that's an F#' or whatever.

Perhaps it's easy to dismiss that as fanciful, or missing the point, but I've since discovered that there's at least one respected musician who makes his living selling exactly the same insights that I worked out back then (I confirmed it by writing to him and explaining how I saw it). So I'm happy that it works and that - at least for me - it's the most useful way of 'seeing' the fretboard. :)

I guess that's one of the great things about music - we all have our own way of seeing it, and our own style of playing. :wink:

Cheers,

Chris

Lots of different lessons on this site..

http://www.musictheory.net/