NEVER Forget The Notes On The Guitar Fretboard Again

over 30 plus years of teaching guitar many of my students have asked about the best way to learn the notes on the guitar you may have even asked that question yourself very often we get bogged down when we're learning guitar with mahive scale patterns and music theory when it's all really a lot simpler than you think in this video I'm going to show you how to easily navigate your way through the notes on the guitar fretboard so that you can quickly find root notes for chords and scales and arpegios tonic notes for keys by using a concept you might not have used before in your learning and your practice called chunking he guys we're looking at another method to memorize the fretboard now this is a really cool one extremely powerful the way we're going to do this is by using a technique called chunking and as we know our musical alphabet goes ABC and what I'm going to do is I'm going to draw this in a vertical line here here A B C D E F and then we're going to go g cuz this accurately represents the string and you can see it looks like that going up there I did a workshop on this but I figured that 45 minute Workshop could probably be condensed down into a shorter video the first thing we're going to do is we're going to look at this idea of chunking and the idea is how do you eat an elephant apart from them being in dangered species and we wouldn't do that the way we would do that h pathetically is we would cut it up into small bite siiz pieces that we can manage to chew with this information here this looks horrendous as it is and actually if you've ever seen the fretboard maps that have got the sharps and flats in and all that nonsense those are even more horrendous so how do we break it down we break it down into chunks now what we'll see is that we get a B and C I'm going to draw these fret wires in between those there and then hopefully you will see that a pattern emerges in there if I put these here together now it was important from the last lesson that a showed you that b and c and e and f were neighbors but what we're going to do is we're going to take this and we're going to put it into some different chunks so this is the first chunk that we're going to do this is why this video is called this is as easy as ABC now this Gap here is one fret or a half step but between the A and the B what happens is we get One Step which is two Frets we can see that there and then between B and C we can see that is a half step and that is one fret so we're going to use these little units of measurement to help us to build these chunks now what we've got is we've got a gap in between this here and hopefully you can start to see that the pattern that we have for the ABC is actually the same pattern that we we have for the DF this is going to be one step this is going to be a half step but in between the C to the D we could think of that as being one step as well so we've got this Gap here that we can put in there and then what we have is this lonely G here this G is on its own in my workshop I called this the G is the gangster that has no crew to hang out with a b c d e f this it goes up one step again and this is always the same guys it never changes never Alters we get the lonely G here and then we go up a whole step again and we get back to a b c so hopefully you can see that we've got exactly the same pattern there as we have there and there's just always going to be one step in between them now there is something that goes in that step and those are Sharps and flats and if you want to learn more about that then watch this video here here but the thing to come away with it is that we only have three chunks that we need to be able to consume this is chunk one this is chunk two and this is the smallest of the chunks chunk three the lonely G that gangster all on his own so what we've got to do now is we've got to take this information and I'm going to use my trusty highlighters and I'm going to take the ABC here I'm going to show you how these chunks all fit together let's get this blue one on for the d e and the F and then we'll have this green for the lonely G so using this we're just going to spot out where the ABCs are so let's look at this so there is the chunk for ABC this is a good way of doing if we know this is the a string then we know it's going to go ABC but if we look up here on the E string ABC now the thing to remember is anything that happens on the E string here is going to be mirrored on the thin E string as well so so let's just scoot over there and just get that one out of the way there and you can see it says ABC wonderfully easy and every string will have its own ABC on it so let's go up the D string and you can see we have to travel quite far up the neck here to the ABC just there and then let's look on the G string not too far up from the headnote that goes ABC there this is a bit of a tricky one cuz you notice we get one high up from the 10th fret that goes over the 10th 12th and the 13th there and we only get part of it there in the BC you can think to yourself okay we can make another pattern with this we could have b c d EFG and then have a lonely a hopefully that makes sense if that doesn't make sense rewind it you can see that you can come up with another way of seeing this the more ways you have into understanding then the easier it is for you to absolutely own that knowledge so we've got the ABC's all done and dusted there right we've got the DFS the these guys we'll do them in this blue color here so we've got a DF just there and then if we go on this one here DF again and we know that we're going to get the DF just after the ABC cuz we know our alphabet obviously but we know that there is a whole step in between the C and the D and you can see going up there one fret two fret which is also known as a step brilliant so let's look at the next string here g string a BC Upp a hole step and you can see we get DF there also on the B string we get a little bit of a disruption cuz of the kink in the tuning we get the DF just there and then just to complete it off on this thin E string DF cuz it's an E string we have to bounce that over onto the thick E string as well and you can see we get DF again now the cool thing that you may have noticed is how these pair up next to each other just like the other fretboard video that if you haven't seen will be in the end screen of this video oops and let me just get these partial ones then d e f just to be completest but the thing to notice is how these ABC D EFS work parallel to each other we get that parallel pattern Happening Here on the E and the a string a b c d e f come over to the next two strings which are the A and the D string we get a b c d e f if we come a little bit fur further up the neck of the guitar remember from that video we had bead to help us to understand where we were we could spot that a we got a b c d e f and then coming over to this puzzling Enigma that is the G to B string you can see that we have to compensate by going up one fret a b c up one fret d e f up here going from the B string to the D string the pattern is back in its familiar shape of a b c d e f and I kind of think think of those as being like Lego blocks six different bits that fit together so if you imagine a Lego block it's the ones that you stand on that's silent pain when you stand on one of those guys so the whole idea here is that we can chunk this down we only have three chunks that we need ABC d e f and g this ABC here it just repeats again oh I didn't put in the lonely G let's just do him on his own the G is just there standing out with no other crew members to play with so hopefully you can see how this all works it's a cool way of learning your natural notes in a linear manner on the string we'll just looking up the string and once you've leared how to find these ABCs then what becomes important is you need to know what goes in there and to learn about what goes in there it's going to be Sharps and flats and that's in this video just [Music] here [Music]

Channel: Ricky Comiskey

Views: 218,912

Keywords: fretboard memorization, guitar fretboard, fretboard notes, guitar notes, guitar notes for beginners, guitar fretboard memorization, learn the fretboard

Id: HQBKP2uStcE

Length: 9min 12sec (552 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023