Guidelines for practice and our guiding philosophy?

Interval-based

Music is built of intervals. The interval is the most fundamental component to understand. So immediately following notes, we should know and internalize the intervals. You should be able to instantly get to any interval within reach of any note. When you can do that, everything else becomes more accessible.

That may sound daunting, but it’s attainable. There are a total of 11 intervals, and they need to be learned from a central note on each string. And the only time they look different is when they cross over the maj3 between the G and B strings, in which case there’s a one fret adjustment. It’s easier than you might think, but it takes time to internalize and must be maintained.

This exercise should be done more than any other.

And once you’ve completely internalized the intervals, you’ll recognize them immediately in the triads, chords, and scales. You’ll easily be able to invert chords or find different voicings. You’ll easily modify scales. You’ll be able to strategically land on certain intervals over chord changes.

A practical guide to using Fretboard Grimoire

  • Practice each exercise for a minimum of 10 minutes before moving on.
  • Feel free to go longer or do multiple exercises (10+ minutes) per session.
  • Rotate through your exercises indefinitely, pushing yourself as you go.
  • Focus on the exercises where you need the most work at your current stage of development.
  • If an exercise seems beyond your ability, take it slow. Figure it out. The path to mastery is riddled with frustration, but when you work through it, it feels that much more rewarding.
  • When doing the exercises:
    • Do the exercises that push your abilities but aren’t beyond your current reach.
    • Occasionally, try the ones that seem impossible. Slow them down and try.
    • Don’t waste time with what’s easy, but revisit them from time to time as refreshers.

The path to fretboard fluency

  • Understand: All notes are a half step apart. Every 12 half steps is an octave, which sounds different but is functionally the same. Two half steps make a whole step.
  • Playing multiple notes together creates harmony. Deeply internalizing all of the intervals is crucial to everything that comes. The goal is always to see the root note and how all the intervals radiate from that root.
  • Diatonic (standard 7 note) scales are built with a series of half (h) and whole (w) steps. For example, the major scale from the root note is w-w-h-w-w-w-h. This is important to understand, but the mind should be on intervals rather than steps while playing.
  • Chords are built by skipping notes of the diatonic scale. A major chord consists of 1 (the root), maj3 (the 3rd note of the major scale), and 5 (the 5th note of the major scale). A minor chord consists of 1, min3 (3rd note of the minor scale), and 5. Those are the basic triads at the root of all popular western music.
  • To add some flavor, skip another note and add the 7.
  • We can keep going for more flavor by adding the 7, 9, 11, or 13. (Understand that 8 is the octave, so 9 = 2, 11 = 4, 13 = 6). If you continue from there, it starts over at the root.
  • When you’re playing lead, your single notes become chord notes or extensions on top of the chord being played.

Some useful ways of visualizing

  • Imagine four quadrants with the root note at the center. In any key, if you know where the notes are in relation to that root in all four quadrants, you can do it all over the fretboard.
    • This applies to anything—even 3nps scales. If you can play up and down the scale with your forefinger on the root or with your pinky on the root, you can play it all over the fretboard.
  • Most fundamentally, for making music, ensure you can see the chord tones in all quadrants—first major, then minor, then dominant, and then diminished.

The strength of these exercises

We’ve done our best to choose exercises that accomplish a few goals to improve learning efficiency.

Here are the goals for our exercises:

  • Exercises that help you learn the fretboard should force you to think rather than mindlessly recite the same patterns.
  • We try to create compound exercises. For example, if the focus is triads, the exercise might also reinforce your understanding of notes and intervals.

Practice tips

  • Set a timer, and don’t stop practicing until it’s over.
  • Avoid frustration by permitting yourself to fail repeatedly until the timer is up.
  • After the timer is up, start it again if you feel up to it. But either way, commit to trying again tomorrow until it starts to click.
  • Once things start to click, you’ll want to practice until you’ve mastered it, which will become boring. Boredom from difficulty should be persisted through. Boredom from mastery means it’s time to move to the next objective.
  • Include a combination of thinking exercises for fretboard mastery, technique exercises, licks, improvisation of tracks, and writing.