Post by Deleted on May 22, 2018 20:04:29 GMT -5
Thanks for the link to the alternate/open tunings information. I have never used any other tunings, I have enough mental stress remembering where to find the notes I want in regular tuning without overloading my mental circuits with other tunings! LOL!!! Maybe if I get smarter, I can handle it.......
May I suggest a quick and easy daily exercise to really learn the notes on the fretboard painlessly over time?
1. Close your eyes and just plop your finger somewhere on the fretboard. This will be your note for the day's note finding exercise. You start with a randomly selected note.
2.Identify that note. You know the open strings (E A D G B E), which repeat at the 12th fret, and the notes you use to tune at the 5th fret (A D G B E A since the top and bottom strings are the same note, different octaves). You can count up or down chromatically (i.e. in half steps) from the selected note to one of the known notes.
3. Find that note along the 6th string, the 5th string, etc. going up from the lowest occurrence of the note on the 6th string to the highest occurrence of the note on the 1st string.
4. Then retrace your steps going back down to the lowest occurrence of that note on the 6th string.
You know that each note occurs only once between the open string and the 12th fret on any one string and that each string between the opens string and and the 12th fret has one of every note in the chromatic scale (the set of all notes used in Western music).
If you pick at random, just one note per day to do this exercise, over a period of a few weeks, you will begin to readily see all the notes on the fretboard just as easily as we do on a piano keyboard. It works, I still do it every day just to keep the notes always fresh in mind.
The whole exercise may take a while (maybe as much as 10 or 15 minutes) in the very beginning, but soon enough, it will only take a minute or less per day. I know of no easier way to get this process of learning the notes on the fretboard done. I got this idea from Ted Greene's Chord Chemistry and developed it into a daily quick practice.
If a person really got into a particular open tuning, such as Pierre Bensusan does with DADGAD as his "standard" tuning, the exercise would work for that too. For me, standard tuning is my home, and any open tuning is just something to play around with occasionally.
Personally, I find a lot of value in really knowing the notes on the fretboard. You can break out of the "boxes" we guitar players often put ourselves in with the CAGED and similar systems. If you know how to spell chords (i.e. major 1,3,5 minor 1,b3,5, etc), you can find your own chords anywhere on the fretboard you need them, voiced any way you wish. The same is true for the 3rd, 6th, and 10th intervals, placing the melody on top of a chord to arrange solo instrumentals, etc. It is valuable knowledge, and is entirely practical rather than some esoteric music theory exercise to impress other people with.
Tony