Know your fretboard - II

Hi again from Tamborine Mountain, Australia, where spring has sprung. Here's hoping the twangin' is good for you, and if you're in need of something to get your musical teeth into, this article should at least whet your appetite.

I've been playing guitar and mixing with guitarists for over 40 years now, and there's always one topic that beats all others hands down: soloing, playing lead, improvising ... whatever you want to call it. It's one thing to learn a bunch of chords and remember them for next time, or play a well rehearsed riff in a certain spot in the tune, but to invent on the spot needs a whole new approach.

I won't even bother mentioning scales. They never helped me to solo, and those who think playing scales IS soloing are wrong.

So how do you go about it? I say "know your fretboard", and when I say that, I mean it in terms of chords. I discovered a long time ago that all pieces of music are in fact chord progressions at their simplest, and that they (the chords) come one at a time. While they are there in the present moment of the timeline, they are setting the rules for everything that occurs, whether it's melody, harmony, chord fragments, double stops... anything that you as player may want to add to the piece MUST follow the rules set by the chord. It goes without saying that the key is the most important thing to know, because the key automatically generates the 7 related chords, but more often that not, composers use chords other than those 7, so it's essential to keep track of all chords as they come and go.

So I say “Know your fretboard”, and I mean know it in terms of chords. I'll show you what I mean.

Let's pick a chord, any old chord... let's say A, since it's the first letter in the alphabet. What do you think of when you hear someone say "A major"? I bet you think of the open A chord... or perhaps you think of it and the barre A chord at the 5th fret.

Click here to see what I think of when I hear "A major". (Requires Windows Media Player)

(What I did in the movie was first play the positions for "A", then I played single notes from those positions. It's important to remember that all those notes are either 1s, 3s or 5s of "A", therefore ALL work against that chord. I then played a few double stops (again, combinations of 1-3-5) up and down the neck. I then finished with a little melodic riffy thing in A. Again, it's important to understand that it used the main notes of "A" to underpin the melody. All the other notes can be considered as "passing notes", even if some of them were from the A scale.) The main thing to realize is that the whole length of the fretboard is covered in "A", as it is all other chords… they're all there, everywhere, all the time.)

The fact of the matter is, an "A major" chord is nothing more than a set of 3 notes: A, E and C#. These three notes are the 1st, 3rd and 5th notes of an A scale. It so happens that the guitar is designed and tuned in such a way as to display those three notes in convenient clusters, but ANY combination of those three notes is an A chord. So anywhere you can find these notes will work against an A chord -- will sound right. Again, this goes for all chords.

Being able to see each chord in this fashion, spread the whole length of the fingerboard, allows you to access it anywhere and in any way you choose. You may decide a compact high pitched 'chop' every 4th beat might be a good way to express yourself in a certain situation; or you may want to add a low bass line riff; or arpeggiate an open sounding version of the chord; or you may be called upon to play a solo; or you may decide to add a harmonized descending line behind the vocal. You can do any of these and whatever else you decide only if you can see that chord of the moment as occupying the whole fretboard.

The beauty of the guitar is that once you learn how to do this with one chord, you've done it for all. I decided decades ago that all chords were just variations of major chords. In other words, minors were majors with a flat 3; Major7's were just majors with a flat 1 added (I prefer to count down from 8 for my 7's); augmented's were just majors with a sharp 5; sus 4's were just majors with a 4 instead of a 3; minor 7ths were just majors with a flat 3 and a flat 7... etc. There isn't a chord in the book that can't be viewed in this way. So if you REALLY know where all your major chords are (I see them as "pure"), you know where all others are too. Once you can see them, you can play them either as chords, single notes, double stops, or combinations of all.

There is trick to this visualization technique, one I came up with years ago when I started to do session work. I needed a quick shorthand way of finding my way around the fretboard so that when the producer told me "Kirk, add a 9 to the second chord of the chorus", or "play a melodic line over that augmented chord", I knew exactly what he meant. It's one thing to understand how chords scatter themselves, another to "see" them doing so.

That simple trick is the subject of my book PlaneTalk -- The Truly Totally Different Guitar Instruction Book. I've been selling it to the world from my website for 7 years now, and it's taught thousands of guitarists how to see how music lays itself out the length of the fretboard. I get feedback on a daily basis, some of which is posted at my site, and I have set up the PlaneTalkers Forum where the technique can be discussed. There are no dissatisfied customers, no complaints.

If you're still wondering what the secret is, what the master template is, what the TRICK is, then drop into my site for a visit and read more about this technique. Click here to go there. It took me many, many years of playing to see it there (it's so obvious once you know), so why not save yourself the effort? For the price of a couple of lessons, you'll be armed with a technique guaranteed to keep you from ever getting lost again.

If this all seems a little beyond you, try visiting GuitarForBeginners.com, another site of mine dedicated to the beginners. As always, I use plain English.

More of these articles are archived here at Guitarsite and also at articles.thatllteachyou.com

Until next time, all the best, happy twangin'.

Kirk

kirklorange.com