Fretscapes

Hello, fellow twangers. It's been a long busy while since I last posted here. Apologies for the gaps in my articles.

Before I get into the theme of this one, fretscapes, a couple of Internet things to report:

The Slide Guitar Web Ring, which I started years ago through Webring.com (which was then sold off to Yahoo! then back to Webrings.com) is no longer. I have deleted it and the Bravenet version I subsequently started, and replaced it with a new Slide Guitar Web Ring using a cgi script hosted at my own website. Yes, I finally have figured out how to use cgi scripts at my sites. Big breakthrough. If you are one of the 90 or so members, you will have to join the new ring. Sorry for the inconvenience. Go to http://www.thatllteachyou.com/sgwr.htm

I mention this because it was through the web ring that I first heard of Hans Theessink, a brilliant blues slider from Holland who now lives in Austria. He was one of the first to join. I was amazed last month to see his name on a poster advertising his appearance here at Tamborine Mountain. He's touring Australia and dropped in here at my place for a coffee and chat and jam before the gig. He invited me up for the last set and the joint was jumpin'. The Internet is very cool.

I've done about 8 gigs in as many days, as half of two duos, and with my three-piece MumboGumbo line-up. It's been great for my hands, my brain, my ears and my fretscapes. "Fretscape" is a term I coined in one of my first articles (I notice some one has registered fretscape.com) and I define it as "The musical look and feel of the fretboard; the way music lays itself out on the fretboard; the musical environment of the fretboard." It's a very hard thing to define, as it turns out, but it's something that I've come to rely on exclusively when I play now.

There are many factors that make a guitar fretboard seem indecipherable when you first bring one home: dozens of places to find notes, that kink in the tuning, the dot inlays which seem to imply something but don't really, the repeat notes everywhere. I literally spent years trying to lay it out in my mind. What I was after was a fretscape, a way of seeing it all there at a glance, a way of knowing where my scale notes are without playing or practicing scales; a way of instantly seeing and plotting a course through all the possibilities that avail themselves to a guitarist; a means of tracking the relevant musical structures that make up the song. Now, after all these years of doing it, when a song starts up and I establish the key, my guitar lays itself out for me in my mind's eye and then it's up to me to make something musical of it. A B flat fretscape is totally different than an E7 fretscape; a blues in G fretscape bears little resemblance to a country song in C; a funky feel in G minor fretscape has nothing to do with a swing in C#Maj7 fretscape.

The beautiful thing, of course, about the guitar, is that all these fretscapes come from one master template, and even though they're all different, they're really all the same. The "moveability" of music on a fretboard is the only reason any of us persist in learning guitar. Once you learn the relationship of scale notes to chord shapes, all you need do is move the whole pattern up or down the fretboard to "see" all chords/scales/harmony.

The key to mastering this visualization technique is to zero in on triads. I wrote a whole book, PlaneTalk, on the subject, so I'm not going to give it all away here, but triads are the most compact way of viewing music, as they contain only one each of the required notes. There are major triads, minor triads, augmented and diminished, they can be distorted into sevenths, major sevenths, flat fives, sus fours -- whatever -- at a glance. Once you know where the triads are, everything else follows.

So when I talk about fretscapes, I'm talking about the way the triads pin the music down on the neck and allow the player to see all the other notes in relation to them. The triads are the chord notes, the boss notes -- the Ones, Threes and Fives -- the "launch and resolve" notes for any melodic exploration. Surrounding the triads are all the other notes, scale and non-scale, good and bad. It doesn't take long to know which are which, by physical location and by sound. Once you can do that, you're on your way. When the G minor funky feel comes up, you can set your brain to G, then "minorize" it, meaning "flat all threes" (which you can now see there on the fretboard). The C#7 swing thing needs the template to lock into the C# position, then the 7 is duly inserted into the triads, and off you go. All other notes are tracked in terms of One Two Three Four Five Six Seven. No need to label them otherwise.

This process of elimination -- reducing the 12 note chromatic scale to a series of triads -- is explained in great detail in my book PlaneTalk -- The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book. It's much easier to explain using graphics, and if you're at the stage in your playing where you're looking for the trick to it all, why not drop into the site http://www.lorange.kirk.net and find out more about it. You can also now join the PlaneTalk Online site for an online version of the course. Don't let the comic strip format fool you. I found that having the student there asking the usual questions to be a great way of explaining a tricky subject.

All the best,

Kirk