Tip of the Week
February 2nd, 2010
We guitarists tend to process most of our musical understanding visually. That is, we often "know" our chords and scales by what they look like and not by how they sound. This is a major mistake. Musical understanding should first and foremost be based on our ability to hear and identify different sounds. Imagine if a painter couldn't identify different colored crayons by sight, but only by where they found them in the box. That would be unthinkable! We should always strive to have several different levels of understanding when it comes to various musical elements. We should know what the notes of a chord or scale are, and we should know how it sounds what kind of musical mood it creates. Finally, we should be able to find these notes anywhere on the fingerboard and create a fingering that helps us execute the desired notes with ease.
Try this; take any scale you know and map the notes out on a twelve-fret fingerboard diagram. Then, practice improvising up and down one string. Do this with each string, taking an entire day to play only on one string (i.e. 1st string on Monday, second string on Tuesday, etc.). Only on the seventh day should you attempt to play all seven strings freely. If you really take a week to do this, I guarantee you'll start to notice a few things. First, you'll begin to forget about "boxes," "shapes," and "forms" and start to really hear the sound of the scale. Second, you'll likely notice that the scale has a very specific pattern of intervals (steps, half-steps, etc.) that your ear can identify and you'll start to hear the scale in that way, instead of seeing the scale as a visual pattern with a set fingering in a specific location on the fingerboard. Third, and most importantly, you'll realize that the scale you are working with creates a certain sound and that sound can be accessed all over the fingerboard. When you get to this place in your understanding, you will no longer be bound by three-note-per-string forms, CAGED forms, or any other "system." You will finally be free to explore any tonality in a way that is not restricted by another person's understanding (or misunderstanding) of how the fingerboard works.