During the first part of this course, we covered some of the initial steps you need to take to start navigating around the fretboard with confidence.
You know what the chromatic scale is, and can map out the notes on any string.
You also know how to build a variety of connections from any given note, to start linking those notes to other sections of the fretboard.
In this way you can change keys and move chords around the fretboard to create different chord voicings. You also now have an understanding of the contents of your fretboard.
You are no longer looking at 120 or 144 individual frets. Instead you have the awareness that these frets are made up of just 12 notes which repeat all over the guitar.
In short, the first part of this course has helped to provide you with a solid foundational understanding of your fretboard and how to navigate around it.
Having said that, there remain some steps to complete before you can gain total confidence moving across your fretboard.
This is simply because our approach so far has been focused on the E and A strings, and the lower registers of the guitar – up to the 12th fret. So there are still large portions of the fretboard which remain a mystery.
It is worth noting that the chromatic scale provides you with a way of working out all of the notes on your guitar.
In this way, that knowledge technically provides you with everything you need to find any note on your guitar.
However, as already noted – treating each note on your fretboard in isolation greatly increases the amount of material you need to learn.
So whilst you could go across each string individually and try to commit the notes on them to memory, doing so would prove challenging.
You would have to memorise each note individually, along with any new scales, chords and songs you might be learning. Not to mention all of the other pieces of non-guitar related information that you need to remember each day.
In the second half of this course then, we will look at further connections that you can build to start targeting notes beyond the E and A strings.
Specifically, we will look at what are known as octave shapes. These are shapes that you can use to find the same note in different octaves, all over the fretboard.
We can build these from the low E and A strings, and in this way we can start to build confidence moving beyond these strings.
As a result, by the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Identify notes on the D, G and B strings with ease
- Take any note on the guitar and identify all of the versions of that note across the fretboard
- Move fluidly and confidently between different positions on the fretboard
- Create licks and phrases that target specific notes
Combined with the information covered in the first part of this course, this will transform your ability as a guitarist, and improve all elements of your playing.
In the next lesson we will dive straight into the first set of octave shapes.
So when you are ready to do so, head over and dive in!
