When the Guitar Fretboard Finally Starts to Make Sense - 478

Learning the fretboard in fragments

0:00Welcome, friends, to the Play Guitar Podcast. I'm Lane. I'm here to help you become the guitar player that you always wanted to be. We're at a pretty interesting time in the Academy lifespan. We've been doing this for a long time. We've been helping people for a long time. I've seen a lot of different people. I've got a good idea of the things that people are struggling with because I talk to a lot of people.

0:32I help a bunch of people, one-on-one, go through these problems. The number one thing that holds people back is knowledge of the fretboard, understanding what it is they're playing. I'm not talking music theory. This isn't a music theory question. I'm not trying to convince you, although music theory is very helpful. But you can still unlock the fretboard without really knowing tons of music theory, just by how it happens, how it works.

1:05So what we're going to be doing today, I have an outline that I'm probably going to throw out the window here. But the first few things, let's talk about how you start. So when you start on the guitar, you know a little bit about open position, right? You may learn a little smoke on the water, a couple of riffs. And then at some point, you venture away from there and you learn a 1-4-1-3-1-3-1-4-1-3-1-4-1-4 pattern.

1:37You learn your first pentatonic pattern. And then everything just falls into place. That's where the big light bulb happens. Oh, I play these. They match the chords that are playing. And now I can sound like I'm in the ballpark. I'm in the game. Right. So that's how most of us learn. We learn in fragments. We take a little bit of knowledge and try to make something out of it as quickly as possible. The cool thing about the guitar is you can do that. You can know a few chords and make a song, play along with the song, play some very famous

2:16songs that you would love to be able to play just with three chords. And that is a little bit of hand-eye coordination and a little bit of memorizing there. Right. So, as you start to get into these things, your ear develops as well, too. And you start to realize, hey, I'm in the game, but I'm not playing everything that I could. I hear other people play, and it's a little bit different. What happens is they're using parts of the guitar, and they're using different sounds, families, groups of notes that I'm using.

2:56I'm not versed in that yet. So that's when we start to go, oh, maybe I need to know a little bit more about the guitar so I can get around a little bit more and pull out some of these cool notes that I'm hearing other people play. So you start to look at the fretboard as a whole, and quickly it becomes overwhelming.

3:19One hand can't play the entire fretboard at a time, and it's tough to remember from one area to the next what it is that you're playing. But you start to see these things happening in fragments that join up to each other. Oh, I see a scale, but I see someone playing something behind it or above it. Oh, those must be two other places that we've made some connections. You find that when you get to pattern one, usually this is really what happens.

3:53You end up going up into pattern two and playing a little extension. I know everyone is familiar with that now, right? So this is my pattern one and fifth fret. I can go up to the eighth fret and tenth fret. There's a little box there. Oh, it extends. It also extends backward.

4:14I'm making connections now. Now we're on the road here. We're on the road to breaking through on the fretboard. We're understanding it a little bit more. Hey, there is a series of patterns, and these patterns will keep you in a group of notes that will sound good in a certain key. And they don't end. Pattern one doesn't end. It goes to pattern two, and pattern two goes to three and four. And if you study it long enough, you realize that there are five patterns here.

4:45And there's other systems, too. There's three notes per string, and there's the, what was that, Pepper Brown had that one for every fret. That was awesome.

4:55He was my favorite, or is. I haven't kept up with him. I'm not sure what's going on with Pepper.

Connecting scales and chords

5:01And so we have one, two, three, four, and five. These are, if we learn these, we're now opening up the fretboard. It's called a five-pattern system. Five-pattern system, we can start to learn five groups of notes, five patterns, and get tons of different sounds from them, not just the one sounds. So what starts to happen as you go along, I think the purpose of this is for you to find out where you are.

5:33I'm outlining the whole trip, and I hope you've seen where you have been up till now. And as we go farther, you can start to see where you're headed. And maybe that will filter out some things that you're working on and highlight some other things. Maybe you can go through this a little bit faster. You don't have to wait decades and decades. So we have the things that we already know. What do you know?

6:03You know a C chord, you know a G chord, a D chord, an A chord, an E chord. You know your minors, A minor, E minor, D minor. You know your bar chords. Now you start to say, okay, I see that scales go across the fretboard, but I can also do that with chords. And you start to realize that these patterns that we can play one at a time or play all at a time are immovable. The relationships stay the same, even if you started at a different fret.

6:35So this note here, a B going to an F sharp is a fifth. If I take that pattern up and I go up to the seventh fret, we have an E and a B. That is the same interval. That's also a fifth. You may not know what a fifth is, but you know it's the same idea. It's the same type of sound. It's the same relationship, just in a different key. So as we start going through these chords, you start to realize, hey, this bar chord that I'm learning, that the internet's telling me to learn, it looks a lot like my A chord in open position.

7:14Hey, this one looks a lot like my E chord in open position. You're starting to take the things that you know and start to make some connections again. And familiar things become landmarks to you. You start to say, well, hey, that's a, that D that's at the fifth fret, that's the root note of that A-shaped chord there. That's major. What if I did an A minor chord with that root being the landmark, right? Or what if I did an octave?

7:47Oh, that's a D there too. And you start to realize, as you go through your scales and chords, what you thought were two different camps, right? Two different ideas. I know my chords over here, and I work on my chords, and then I stop. Then I go over here, then I work on my scale. What you're going to start to realize is these familiar shapes that you learn in the very first few days of your guitar career. Keep occurring over and over and over and over again.

8:22I haven't played ever where I didn't play some sort of an A minor shape or some sort of a G shape or some sort of a D shape. Usually play them all night long, right? If I'm playing blues, some sort of an E dominant seventh shape. A C seventh shape. A C nine, right? I start to see these things. Now, as you start to learn your scale patterns and work through the five pattern system, and you start to play your chords, you get to the point where it's time to bring those together. So, once you bring those together, you realize, well, we have something very special that brings these two worlds together, that is arpeggios.

9:05Those are the notes of the chords from the shapes we learned early on, but played one after another like a scale or like a melody. The line. So, it's a chord played as a line.

9:30As we go through these, if you've got eyes, you're going to see these things start to look very familiar. You can see where those shapes, the arpeggio shapes, are in your scale patterns, and you start to see where they are in your chords. All of a sudden, the world of guitar got smaller. What you thought was an enormous problem. I'll never be able to learn all those things.

10:01I'll never be able to learn all those scales. Never be able to memorize all of those chords. And you realize, I don't have to do all that. I can take what I already know and get new sounds from. I can build new chords on my own, through my scales. I can take the scale patterns I already know and get these other sounds. By starting on a different note of the scale, now I'm getting a new sound. You see where we've gone. We've gone from fragmented local learning to diving into the deep end of the pool, getting overwhelmed, then breaking it down into sections, then finding movable things, and through all that, finding shapes that go back to the same shapes that you learn on the first few days of playing.

10:52Then we found the bridge, which was arpeggios, and why arpeggios are so important for opening up the neck of the guitar.

Playing with certainty and confidence

11:02Now, learning starts to compound. As you start learning new licks, you start seeing shapes in those licks. You start seeing where they came from. You start moving around the neck a little bit. You might play something on an E here, but it sounds better here. Or sounds better here. It sounds better here. You're starting to play that. You realize that the same note is on every string, and you can move the same exact ideas to different places on the guitar, and everything can feel very different.

11:39These new licks can teach you about a pattern, too. You play it in one pattern, they go to another. So, where are you now? Now, you're navigating. You're not searching anymore. And that's important. What I say a lot is I want you to be able to play from a place of being certain. I don't want you to play from hope anymore. And we all know what it feels like to play from hope. I've done it a lot.

12:09You know, you're up there. It's your time to play. Maybe you're at a friend's house jamming, and it's your time to do a solo, and you're going up for this note. And you played it before, and it sounded good, so it's probably going to sound good now. And then it doesn't. And then you realize, oh, okay. Things aren't working so well now. I have a lot of information. I understand how the fretboard works. But now, I'm not using it correctly. I'm not coming from a place of being certain and confident. I'm coming from a place of hoping that it works.

12:41And you start to realize, oh, I can use my fretboard. And I can take the ideas on this fretboard, my chords and my scales. And if I think of them both at the same time, do my scales match the chord, or do they not? Both are valid. You could have notes that are outside. You could have other notes that are in the family of the scale that aren't the strong notes. Or you could have the notes in the chord that match perfectly. Now, I'm using the same stuff I learned in the first few days of playing guitar to match my note choices together.

13:19Now, I've got a sense of control over this. I'm taking the things that I've learned on the guitar, and I'm making something out of them. I'm deciding when to play a strong note. I'm deciding when to play a weak note, depending on the chord that's playing at the time. So, you start navigating these things, and you start to be able to do that maybe in one pattern. I've started in pattern one, and let's say I'm playing an A minor to F to a G.

13:53And I'm in A minor.

13:55Now, the G's coming up.

13:58I'm going to hit this note. That's a D. Why? Because D is the fifth of a G. I know that. Why? Because... Not from music theory, because I've practiced my arpeggios on the... Which is kind of a little bit music theory, right? But not in depth. Just going through the chords that you already know and mapping them out in different places. This is the third note you come to in an arpeggio. The root, the third, and the fifth. Right? This was G. That was a D note. Okay.

14:29Wow, that just happened. I'm playing along. A chord came up, and I targeted one of the notes in the chord that wasn't the root. Because the root is the easy one. That's the ones we always target. Wow. Listen, that sounds different. Oh, let's continue to navigate there. So, knowing where we can go next, being able to move across the fretboard, being able to start at different places, knowing where your root notes are, knowing where a single note is across the fretboard.

14:59You can take your five patterns, and you can go, well, where's my root note in each? Well, here's pattern one. Pattern two. Pattern three. Pattern four. Pattern five. Back to one. Two. Three. Three.

15:16Hey. Those were all the A's on the guitar. I use that from being familiar with the neck of the guitar.

15:31Your ideas will start to travel. As you explore around, you will be able to build chords, be able to build melodies. And not only that, you'll be able to hear melodies. You'll start to, your ear and your eye and your hands start to work together as you're down here towards the other end of this journey. And then you'll start to hear other people playing. And you'll be able to imagine what that would be if you played it on the guitar. That's another one of those, whoa, I can't believe that that's happening.

16:03You hear someone play and you go, oh yeah, that's in D. You can probably do that already now because D is so distinctive. When you hear that chord in a song, you can probably do that now, I would think. But when you start to hear some inside notes, you go, oh, I know what that is. I'd like to play that the next time I play. You're getting familiar with sounds, the sights, the feel of these things. And then eventually, everything gets smaller and smaller and smaller to the point where

16:35you go through different styles of music and realize there's really not a whole lot different. It's more the decoration of the music than it is the structure of it as well, too. That was my journey from the beginning of fretboard knowledge to a place where you're a happy and functional musician playing. And I'd like to thank you for spending your time with me today.

The five pattern system blog post

17:01If you'd like to learn more about this, I have a blog post I'd like for you to read. And that is the five pattern system. That's what I'm talking about this month. I'm trying to get people to embrace this and stop just knowing one pattern or two patterns and actually stop just playing. You may have learned all of the patterns, but just because you know something doesn't mean you can play it well. I'm trying to get you to, on a routine, go through the different scales, at least the big four scales, major, minor, major pentatonic and minor pentatonic, and spend time in each

17:34of the patterns, quality time there. That's something we're doing in the dojo every week. We have a great group of people that came in just for this last time that was open. And we're really having fun. Just put the new lesson up last night. And, but, but this is a big part of it. Opening up the fretboard, navigating, being able to react when music changes in real time. So I'd like for you to read that blog post if you can. The link is in the show notes and I will see you soon.

18:06Okay. Bye-bye everybody.