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Fretboard Memorisation with Modular Arithmetic

19 points by ohaodha

by maxwells-daemon

3 subcomments

As someone who also used to overthink memorizing the fretboard: this is a bad idea. You should strive to just plainly memorize the names of all of the notes, the relevant scale and arpeggio patterns, etc, without any kind of tricks or "system" (no, not CAGED either). This is the only path to real fluency; imagine having a neat system of remembering what each English word means and having to go through it every time you wanted to speak!

by wrs

1 subcomments

While cellos, violins, etc. don't technically have frets, the notes are of course in the same layout as instruments that do have frets, so this same method works.
(It's funny how different instruments live in their own worlds. Once I showed a movable scale fingering diagram for guitar to a cello player and they had no idea what I was talking about, even though the cello has the same kind of patterns, as would any parallel-stringed instrument. Another cello player did know about scale patterns but called them "universal fingerings".)

by rc5150

0 subcomment

This approach is basically the same mental model as Adam Kadmon's Guitar Grimoire but with extra steps and music-agnostic vocabulary.

by runarberg

1 subcomments

If you are learning the guitar and are interested in music theory (or meta-learning), one resource I cannot recommend enough is Absolutely Understand Guitar by Scotty West[1]. These are old video lectures from 1999 which have since been uploaded to YouTube.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg1L-sBIxnY&list=PLJwa8GA7pX...