FRETBOARD KNOWLEDGE

Map out the notes on the guitar and you’ll be flying round the fretboard before you know it!

Moving freely around the fretboard is a goal many guitarists share. Knowing which note you’re playing at any time, where you can move to next or which notes will sound good against a song’s chords will help you take your playing to a new level. We’ll start here with some essential info to help you improve your fretboard knowledge before moving on to some practical applications of this new knowledge.

While we have demonstrated some concepts here, it is not enough to just play through them. The idea is for you to create your own licks and solos to build these skills so they integrate seamlessly into your playing.

8 LEARN THE NOTES ON THE FRETBOARD

Lots of people learn notes by moving up a single string. This doesn’t really work as you only learn the notes as a sequence rather than identifying them in isolation. Instead, select a note (we’ve gone for F) and find it in every location in the neck. Make sure to explore above the 15th fret too and repeat the exercise with different notes. For instance, try finding all the G notes.

9 IDENTIFY OCTAVE SHAPES

Once you’ve covered individual notes, it’s time to move to octaves. This will help you move licks and phrases into different registers. Lots of people like the triangle method shown here. This is good for helping find root notes, but not so great for transposing licks, so we’ve shown an alternative – it doesn’t have a fancy name, but is worth memorising.

10 MOVING OCTAVE LICK: SCALE PATTERN

The lick below shows how easy shifting a sequence into different octaves is. It is the perfect device for building a solo from low notes to a high melody. This scale box gives you a visual representation of how we pieced our lick together.