Knowing the Neck

[JT2]

His ebook was called A.C.E. Guitar Method. The forum member who was giving it away was @JT2

Thanks Dallas for the reference

Hs anyone got any good tips for learning all the notes on the neck of the guitar please?

Thanks in advance

Try this. It really works and it's quick.
.

 

[bread]

A quick update ...

I'm on page 29 of the A.C.E Guitar Method, kindly given to me by @JT2 about a couple of weeks ago. I must say, this is the best guide on learning notes, scales and the fret board I have ever followed.

It's simply, brilliant and makes so much sense. I have had countless lessons over the past 30 years and nothing made sense to me until the A.C.E. Method came along.

I'll keep you posted on progress but so far I pretty much know every note now on the fretboard and it's taken around 2 weeks of about half an hour a day of study.

 

[Joe Bfstplk]

What you want to shoot for is the ability to ask your keyboard player either, "What key is it in?", or preferably "What are the chords?", and then if you are armed with the knowledge I described above, he will never need to ask again.

Edit: I love this from Victor Wooten and it is universally true “You are never more than a half-step away from the right note…”.

Even without any knowledge of theory the right note is always just a half step away from the wrong note you might play. That means on guitar you can often bend your way out of sour notes as soon as your ears hear them. If you have a trem bar you can drop by a half or without a trem slide down by a half. Half steps are always 1 fret. Many great ear players I have played with do exactly this while soloing. They use a lot of chromatics and if their ear detects something wrong they just go up (or down) by a half step until it is right. If note length is short enough it will sound great. The trick is to avoid lingering for longer than say an 1/8th or a 1/16th note in atonal land. So just go up or down 1 fret to resolve the sour note and everything will sound fine.

So even if you do happen to land on wrong notes, the right note is always only 1 fret away! Victor’s suggestion is to practice the Chromatic scale when soloing. This will get you comfortable with hearing both the “wrong” and “right” notes and how you can incorporate them in your playing. The goal here is to not be afraid of making a mistake by playing a wrong note. Try to not be timid in your playing due to the fear of a mistake. Just learn how to detect it by ear resolve it by 1 fret without lingering on the bad note.

Which notes are sour goes back to intervals. But you can train your ears without understanding the theory behind intervals. If it sounds dissonant or sour go up (or down) 1 fret.

...and when you do hit a "wrong" note, and subsequently go up or down a fret to correct it, repeat it on the next pass so it sounds intentional, and then you're playing jazz.

 

[Manny Fufish]

If you want to learn both the notes and intervals all over the neck, you just can’t beat Tom Quayle’s app Solo…

 

[Bruce Sokolovic]

If the note sounds bad, move up the neck a half step. Problem usually solved. But try not to play the bad ones from the get go.

 

[Rex Rox]

...and when you do hit a "wrong" note, and subsequently go up or down a fret to correct it, repeat it on the next pass so it sounds intentional, and then you're playing jazz.

Well said by a cat named Joe who obviously knows his chops!

 

[Keysdweller]

 

[Rex]

A while back, Benji (@islandmusic) wrote and shared his Grand Unified Theory. I can recommend it.

The Grand Unified Theory of Fretboard Organization

 

[spagthorpe]

I can't remember what someone called it, but someone told me along time ago gave me a simple sequence to remember

7 2 9 4 0 7

Easy to remember. That's all the B notes. If you know all those, you also know the C notes, since it's immediately after the Bs. As are two frets in front of the Bs, Ds are two after the Cs. Now you know more than half the whole notes.

 

[Greg Ferguson]

you've just got to brute force it really. there aren't any shortcuts, except one tip i can give you is to write down all the notes on a neck grid (see attached) and you'll see patterns forming. don't use the grid to learn the notes, you have to commit them to memory and that will just slow down the process, but it will give you an overview and help you understand the relationships. when trying to learn things, it often helps to approach the information from different angles.

^THIS^

Way back when, back before we started hearing about CAGE and all that, I noticed what Simeon said, that the notes repeated up and down the neck, and the scales did too. The only thing that threw a wrench into learning was that the interval between the G and B strings is not the same as between all the other strings so there's a fret's adjustment.

Look at the symmetry of the scales AND of chords and it'll make sense. Once you've figured that out you can see the patterns and wander the neck.

 

[Greg Ferguson]

...and when you do hit a "wrong" note, and subsequently go up or down a fret to correct it, repeat it on the next pass so it sounds intentional, and then you're playing jazz.

That's really true in improvising. It's OK to "play outside", it's how you return to playing inside that matters.

 

[Johan Allard]

One thing that helped me was using an app called Tenuto: https://www.musictheory.net/products/tenuto. It gamifies the fretboard showing a note and you have to say what it is. I used to spend hours on this while watching TV.