How To MEMORIZE Your Guitar FRETBOARD: The No-Nonsense Exercise That Actually Works

hello internets nice to see you today we see how to learn all the notes on your guitar fretboard forever so that they become completely second nature would you like to be able to see all the notes on your guitar fretboard so that you instantly know for instance how to find an f not on the second string or instantly know without thinking that if you play the first string at the 10th fret you play a d note today we see how to do just that i already did a video on it but there were some questions and i wasn't super clear on everything and also in the ears i perfected this method so here's right now is the definitive method to learn all the notes on your guitar fretboard forever why would you like to learn all the notes on your fretboard well in my experience i see that finding the notes on the fretboard is what slows down most guitar players whenever you want to find the position of a chord or a scale or whenever you are playing and you want to hit specific note it seems like the actor of finding the note it's the slowest part of the whole process so if you can speed this up you gain a lot and speed in this sense can completely change the way in which you play when you can find your note faster the kind of music that you play the kind of mental process that is going on the kind of things you can do change completely now some people are gonna ask me but can't i learn my guitar fretboard only by patterns or intervals well i'm gonna do another video about that because it's a very interesting question but the short answer is no you have to learn all the notes on your fretboard there is really no shortcut for that this is a corner you cannot cut you have to learn not on your fretboard otherwise it will always be limited on what you can do on your guitar and the worst thing about it is that until you actually learn the notes on your fretboard you're not even gonna see what you are missing now before you start getting scared by the magnitude of this task learning the note is not as hard as you think some people think it's impossible but it's actually easy if one you are willing to practice it for five minutes a day five minutes i'm not asking anything more and two you are going to follow the instructions i'm gonna give you to the letter so here's how to do it i'm gonna explain a series of exercises they are all simple and i want you to do them in this order even and especially if they are easy for you remember that the goal is not just to learn the notes on your fretboard the goal is to make the process super fast so that you can instantly see where the knots are so even if the exercise is easy for you do it anyway and if instead if the exercise is hard take is lower you're going to get through it before you even start doing those exercises get yourself a diagram of all the notes on the guitar fretboard here's one for you this is for standard tuning if you're using a different unit you need a different diagram of course exercise number one the basic exercise we're going to restrict ourselves to frets 1 to 12 of your guitar no open strings then you're gonna decide one note and we're going to pick only natural notes so no sharps no flats and you want to pick one of those notes let's say i'm going to pick a and play this knot on the sixth string then on the fifth string then on the fourth string then the third the second and the first so you want to go in order you absolutely must not jump strings so you're gonna play this then you're gonna play the same from string 1 to string 6 again in order [Music] if you can play your knot three times up and down without making any mistake slowly well then you're done with that note and you can move on the next note if you have five minutes a day this means you may have time for only one note in the day or you may have time for all your notes in that day depending on how fast you are and it's not important if you're fast or not just do what you can right now a few important things yes you can have the note diagram in front of you and you can watch it while you do the exercise the important thing is not if you are looking at the diagram or not the important thing is that your hands are doing the exercise two notice that i didn't say anything about memorizing anything you don't have to memorize those patterns indeed when you finish all the seven natural notes you want to restart and redo all the seven notes again and most likely you'll have to find again the pattern from scratch this is normal i myself haven't learned all those patterns yet and i've been doing this exercise for years because the goal of the exercise is not to learn the pattern by doing this exercise and the next ones you are going to learn where the notes are so it's perfectly okay if it feels to you like nothing is happening it's perfectly okay if it feels to you like you're not learning anything because you are not supposed to memorize those patterns your task is simply to play through this exercise i cannot stress this enough many students get frustrated because it feels to them like they are not learning anything because they can't remember the pattern ignore that keep playing it it works if you do it now what about the notes above fret 12 well above for 12 everything repeats so it's technically not necessary but if you feel that that part of the fretboard is less familiar to you well then restrict yourself for instance to fret 5 to 16 or something like that as long as you have a window of 12 frets everything work now once you've done the basic exercise for all the natural notes and you've done it twice meaning that you've went through all the natural notes twice then you can practice exercise number two in exercise number two we use a metronome we start with a metronome at 40 bits per minute and we play one note per bit attention here the metronome is not optional the metronome turns out is exactly what drives your learning of the notes because it adds just this little bit of pressure 40 bpm is not that fast but you know that you have to get that note in a finite amount of time and that you have a deadline to find it so this little bit of pressure it's what pushes your brain to actually learn the notes if you don't do this with the metronome this system does not work if this feels difficult at first don't get discouraged you just need to go through the motion just do the exercises everything else will take care of itself once you can do exercise two for all the natural notes you can go to exercise number three add in the accidentals that is all the sharps and the flats when you add in the accidentals you just think of finding the natural notes and moving one frets up for the sharps or one fret down for the flats so for instance if you're finding the note a sharp you are thinking to find a and you move one fret higher if instead you're finding the note b flat which we know that formally are the same note but for us right now those are two different notes because when you find b flat you are thinking of finding the note b and moving down one fret once you can reasonably do all the sharps and flat with the metronome at 40 bpm notice that i didn't tell you to speed up stay at 40 bpm i know it feels really slow but trust me here once you've done all that then you can go to exercise number four in exercise number four we pick two notes at a time you can decide if you want to do only natural notes or if you also want to add in the accidentals it doesn't really make a difference here once you've chosen your two notes you do this you play one of those notes going up and the other one going down so for instance if i'm playing g and d i'm playing the g note going up and the d not going down without stopping when i change my note that's an important point i don't want to stop when i change the note always with the metronome [Music] when this starts to feel easy then you go to exercise number five in exercise number five we write down all the natural notes in a random order for instance i could write them this way d f c e a g b then always with a metronome at 40 i'm going to play the first note d going up the next note f going down the next note c going up the next e going down the next a going up but g going down b going up again without stopping when you change the note one note per bit never stop once you can do this exercise then you can go to exercise number six in exercise number six we finally start to increase the speed and the idea here is to do the exercises from two to five gradually increasing the speed when you get to 80 bits per minute and you can do exercise number five with the random note at 80 bits per minute then you're done with the same sequence of note i've seen before d f c e a g b that's how it looks [Music] [Music] so [Music] in my experience when you can play exercise 5 at 80 bits per minute then you're done you know your notes you just know where they are it's kind of magic if you want to just look at your fretboard and you know what the notes are now i've seen three different kind of reaction to these exercises the first one is the best one you just see the exercises sit down do the exercises get better that's great if this is your reaction kudos to you you're going to learn all the notes on your fretboard another reaction i've seen is this i'm not gonna do exercise one two four i'm gonna do exercise five immediately because the other are easy well if you do that you're shooting yourself in the foot if you go immediately at exercise number five at a high speed you're not gonna learn your notes because you're gonna put too much pressure on you and your brain is not gonna learn the right way do the first exercise first then the second then the third the fourth the fifth and only at the end increase the speed maybe it would take you a short time to go through all those exercises that's great but don't simply skip them do them even if it takes just a few minutes to do them do them anyway again trust me on that the third reaction i've seen from some student is that they go ah this is too complex it's too hard it's too long it's gonna take forever and then after all why we actually need to learn the notes i can do without well i'll tell you what if you think it's too complex it's too hard it's too long and you're not gonna gain enough then well don't do it you see i teach music theory i'm not a motivational speaker even if i wanted to convince you i'll have no idea how to do it if the idea of finally making your guitar fretboard a familiar place where you know exactly where you are and what not you find and exactly what you're playing at every single moment in time without even have to think if that does not motivate you to practice a few exercises for five minutes a day i got nothing for you i'm not saying that you're lazy or bad or anything i literally don't know how to motivate you so if you want to do it do it if you don't want to do it don't do it the thing i know is that it's very useful to know your notes and it's not as hard to learn it if you just do those exercises in this order everybody who hives in practice all those exercises in this order following all the indication i've given here has learned the notes on their fretboard no exception now if you like these simple exercises that give you a big return on your investment and if you like playing your guitar and if you like getting to know new things and getting better and better at playing your guitar and making great music then i recommend you also check out my course complete chord mastery why should you do that because complete curmastery is a course that teaches you everything there is to know about harmony on guitar if you like writing great chord progression if you like a rearranging song if you like changing the songs and reharmonizing them if you like making your guitar sound like a guitar and not just use the same old cowboy chords then complete core mastery is the course for you there are a lot of exercises like those i just show you in complete core mastery we learn by doing we also learn the theory but the important points that we learn by doing and we apply everything we study on the guitar fretboard immediately so that you can actually do music and not just talk about music if you have a minute click on the link on the top right and check out complete chord mastery if you like this video smash on that like button don't forget to subscribe and especially click on notification otherwise youtube will not let you know when i put up a new video and if you have any suggestions feedback comments write them down in the comments i love reading from you and i'm doing video based on your suggestion this is thomas zelia of music tutoring for guitar.com and until next time enjoy

Channel: MusicTheoryForGuitar

Views: 1,030,240

Rating: 4.9615712 out of 5

Keywords: guitar notes, guitar notes explained, notes fretboard, notes fretboard guitar, fretboard memorization, fretboard memorization exercises, fretboard memorization game, fretboard notes memorization, guitar fretboard mastery, guitar fretboard diagram, fret music theory for guitar, tommaso zillio

Id: PJddQ6Q0UDo

Length: 14min 57sec (897 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 12 2020