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Hi folks, I would like to hear your thoughts about the topic fretboard.
I played guitar for like 20 years, learning jazz guitar by myself for about 10 years as a hobby. I know quite much theories, I know all the important chords, scales, arpeggios, voicings and how to play them on the guitar. But while improvising, I still make mistakes to play the right things in the right time.
For example I could play any chord arpeggio in all position when i was practicing, but while improvising I still couldn't play them freely and naturally. In the moment I try to play it, my thoughts are always
1. where is the root of the arpeggio
2. in which position i am now, can i play that arpeggio near this position?
3. and with which fingering should i play (should i start the first note with the little finger or the middle finger or the index finger? I practiced all...)
And mostly the chords are then over, or I played it wrongly, unnaturally, sounded badly.
The thing is, I think I have the musical ideas in my mind, but couldn't play them in time.
I thought I knew the fretboard, because I know all the notes on the fretboard, I could play anything on the fretboard, but not without thinking. At the beginning I thought I might get to the point that I could freely play anything without thinking when I practice more, but after 10 years I'm still not quite there. My playing is mostly just random stuffs and some licks I was always playing, and sometimes I have the melody in mind but I couldn't play it in time.
I'm thinking that I had a wrong understanding of mastering the fretboard? What are your thoughts?
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07-26-2024 08:47 AM
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How about when practicing improvisation? Do you practice improvisation in the context of the tunes you know or do you directly go from playing arpeggios in all keys to performing tunes?
Originally Posted by Peng1026
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Personally, I play Jazz Phrases, repeatedly, until they are instinctively heard in my mind when playing over Jazz Standards.
(Change the key to fit the songs.)
These type:
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I think this problem probably has two components.
The first is knowing arpeggios etc v being able to use them in real time.
The big thing here, I think, is voiceleading. I usually tell students that, when they’re learning something or struggling with something, they can make the problem slower, smaller, or both. Slower is one most of us get easily … just play slowly and work up the tempo. Smaller is a little tricky.
You can:
Work on just a couple bars of a tune
Work in just a small part of the guitar
Work with just a limited set of materials.
I think all three is a good idea.
For example, if you want to get better at using those arpeggios, use just the arpeggios, pick a single part of a song, and pick a single octave across three strings and try to voice-lead slowly between the arpeggios. Using half notes first … so you play D F - G B - C G - E C# or something for a ii-V-I-VI. Do that and move up the tempo, then pick somewhere else and do the same, then somewhere else, and somewhere else. Then pick another key, etc etc. maybe try quarter notes, or maybe try adding some ornamentation.
Thats sort of the thing for me … it’s sort of improvising but a way to really drill down on specific material in a focused way.
The second component of the problem is vocabulary … turning the fretboard knowledge into lines that sound good. For that transcribing is the move.
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It has been said that only about 30% of what is in the practice room makes it to the stage. This happens to everyone, and one solution is to keep practicing until you know the material so well that you eliminate any hesitation or thinking necessary to execute an idea in real time. As you have noted, if you have to think about something, the chord you were thinking to use it on has already gone by. This applies to playing arpeggios/chords/scales, memorizing a piece, changing positions on the neck, hearing what's going on around you so you can respond to it ... virtually anything you need to do musically, you need to do instantly.
One solution is to continue to practice, so you can eliminate any hesitation or thinking that's getting in the way of executing in real time.
An equally important tool is to have a unifying model that allows you to organize information for instant access. This is understanding theory in sound, on paper, and on the fretboard. That is, if you hear a chord, you should instantly recognize it as major, minor, diminshed, or augmented, and hear the extensions (7, 9, 11, 13 etc) with ZERO hesitation, just as easily as you can tell red from blue or sweet from sour. A concerted effort at ear training, over the course of several years, will help you to gain the ability to recognize sonorities and intervals. A very thorough understanding of harmony will connect your ear to the mental model that allows you to recognize and play or write anything you hear. You can learn this harmonic model thoroughly in four years of university study. Without that formal study, there may be gaps in your understanding; consider some classes at a community college and some private lessons with an experienced jazz guitar teacher. When the study of harmony is intimately connected to ear training, study of formal notation and applied lessons on your instrument, you gain a three-way connection between hearing, playing, and reading/writing: if you hear it, you can play it or write it; if you play it, you hear it in your head before it comes out of your instrument and you can write it down; if you see written notation, you can hear it in your "mind's ear" or sight-sing it, play it on your instrument, and understand the underlying harmonic and compositional devices that tell you what it is/why it works.
If you take the ideas of making things smaller and connecting them to a unifying model, you begin to see the fretboard not just as a set of positions, but a set of repeating patterns that allow you to play small ideas across the length of the neck. I posted a video example recently but can't find it... I'll keep looking.
Another useful concept - much easier to understand than to actually do - is a tip I got from Bruce Forman many years ago: learn to be able to step into any arpeggio in any position on the neck according to the chord you wish to play. One of the posters on this forum has a tagline along the lines of "the right note is only a half-step away" and that is absolutely true. Any note against any chord is either a chord tone or a non-chord tone. So the ability to switch instantaneously into the right scale or arpeggio for a given situation is a matter of mental agility, not physical prowess. The more ways you learn to think about harmony, chord substitution, melodic ideas, and the organization of the fretboard in general, the more tools you'll have to approach any given improvisational task.
So... sorry that there is no silver bullet, but I hope this gives you some helpful ideas. TL;DR: keep practicing, and try to learn as many ways to think about music as you can. When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. Fill your toolbox :-)
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nice line ! Originally Posted by GuyBoden
Personally, I play Jazz Phrases, repeatedly, until they are instinctively heard in my mind when playing over Jazz Standards.
(Change the key to fit the songs.)
These type:
this is reminiscent of
”I thought about you”
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Alan Holdsworth has said..it takes two years to learn a scale..
it sounds almost silly..but..
play the Eb note on the 8th fret..treat it as the root
play the triads and arpeggios of the .major minor dim aug dom chords
now the inversions of those chords
now treat the Eb note as the second note of the Db scale .. do the above
treat the Eb note as the third note of the B scale ..and so on..
this kind of study takes alot of work to master..knowing the basic inversions of all chords in a scale in all positions and on all string sets is a major study
not only of inversions but of voice leading..
Holdsworth..sound silly now?
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I think you are quite right. I sort of ever imagined this method myself, and since no one really told me that I should insist on doing this, I didn't keep on it. I wished I was told this ten years ago, so I would have learned 5 scales now : ) Originally Posted by wolflen
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I swear, it works. I'm not very talented and never been all-in-type when it comes to jazz, or music really.
Did this for a year without even having any faith in it, just to see if it is even possible. And turns out, sure!
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It sounds like you've skipped an important step.... when you practice the arpeggios, do you connect them with one another? For example, if you were to practice playing over a common chord progression like IIm7/V7/IM7 (In C: Dm7/G7/CM7), would you play and connect the chord arpeggios? Originally Posted by Peng1026
You could do the same with other common progressions: Cycle of 5ths, Rhythm changes, etc., through all keys (or at least the hardest ones). And this is important: don't just play the chord tones, make melodies out of them - using primarily chord tones with a few passing notes.
If you can't play the chord arpeggios in real time against the chord changes, it means they are still too much of an abstraction to you. Having abstract knowledge, i.e., knowing the musical tools, and having concrete knowledge, i.e., knowing how to make music with them, are two different things.
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Yeah this is what I was after. Originally Posted by Mick-7
It’s really important. You should be transcribing for vocabulary, and you should be able to make simple, but swinging melodies using only chord tones. Between those two things you should be good to go.
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Originally Posted by pamosmusic
Good summation. Would you consider trying to play what you hear (without writing it down) to be "transcribing"? I ask because I've known very good players who did very little if any actual transcribing but they did listen to the jazz greats a lot and attempt to play what they were hearing.
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Oh yeah for sure. I use the stuffy college word “transcribe” … but I’m talking about learning licks, in whatever way that works for you. Originally Posted by Mick-7
I like to write them down (1) because it makes me think critically about rhythm, which I’m not inclined to do otherwise, and (2) because I teach a lot so it’s incredibly useful to have that stuff to refer back to.
But that’s definitely not necessary.
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My thinking goes in at least two directions.
One is to practice at slower tempos -- assuming you can execute what you want if you slow things down. When you're ready, up the tempo by a few bpm. Rinse and Repeat.
The other direction is less concrete. And, frankly, I'm not sure if what I'm going to say is either correct or otherwise helpful.
To my way of thinking, improvisation is about making melody. That melody may well involve playing an arpeggio at the right moment, but you have to hear that in your mind first and then play it, or so it seems to me. Others view this differently.
From this point of view, improv is conceptually simple. You have to be able to think of a good line and then you have to be able to play it in real time. My simple test: pick a random string/finger/fret and play Happy Birthday without a mistake. If you can do that, all that's left is to think of a good line. So scat sing until you get something you like and then put it on the guitar.
To use an arpeggio, try including one in your scatting.
I'm not saying I can do this reliably - I can't - but that's the goal.
From what you're saying, I think you might benefit from trying this approach for some of your practice time.
Good luck!
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I forgot to add. What the OP had listed in his first post (exactly), made me quit jazz for years.
Just the uncomfortable, annoying need to mind all the abstract non-musical info and squeeze something out of it.
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Thanks for the video, I’ll try your method. How did you make the comping? Is there a tool that generate random chords comping? Originally Posted by emanresu
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Were you gigging? playing with others or just shedding alone? Originally Posted by emanresu
I noticed that I hardly think about all the non-musical info when I play with people. Sure, on my third chorus in a blues I might deliberately think about trying chord subs. But for a 1-2 chorus solo, it’s just tracking chords, mentally humming the melody or both.
The more confident and comfortable I get with a tune, the more “jazzy stuff” I try. But that comfort comes way faster with gigs than it ever did at home.
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A couple ideas for things to work on:
-try isolating scales/arpeggios to 1 octave, and then playing that 1 octave shape on the different string sets. Then try some limitation exercises where you improvise only within that one octave shape. Big six string arpeggio shapes can be pretty unwieldy in real time, and working in a smaller shape is much easier. Plus, if you work through the different permutations of small shapes, you start to see that the big shapes are really just combinations of the small shapes.
-try playing scales/arpeggios through the cycle of fourths within a limited span on the fretboard, usually 5 frets. This helps develop the processing power to find the notes you need without being forced to position shift.
-try playing continuous 8th notes through the chord progression of a tune. You can do it freely, or set rules like no leaps bigger than a whole step or major third, etc. again helps with real time connection of shapes.
But the best thing I've found, and one of my standard pieces of advice is: writing etudes.
Writing an etude allows you to perfectly play what you're hearing. If you feel like you can hear the language you want to play but you can't get it in real time, then just slow everything down and get the language that way. If you do it enough and apply the language in enough contexts, it starts to feel natural under your fingers.
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When you learn a new thing, at first each little part and piece of each step must be consciously guided and controlled. Eventually these steps integrate into units, those units integrate into sections and series, and the processes keep aggregating the parts into larger chunks. In the guitar world this is the evolution of thinking about notes to lines to phrases to melodic targeting structures to coherent solos, and chord types to changes to harmonic patterns to progression segments to song form. Originally Posted by Peng1026
What is supposed to result from this is a reduction in the resolution of your thinking so that the level of effort seems to stay the same - the amount of thought needed to play a scale becomes comparable to the amount needed for melodic targeting structures. Likewise with the chords, the bigger things like harmonic patterns don't need more thought because the details (individual chords and changes) become internalized.
What you are describing sounds to me like you have loaded yourself with a tremendous amount of detail but not acquired much chunking hierarchy with which to maintain a fairly constant level of effort (so, like being in too low a gear). I think difficulty with improvisation indicates that the "up shift" from thinking about pieces, parts, and units to thinking of larger structures has been held back.
My recommendation might be to spend some time each day streaming Jazz from https://www.accuradio.com/jazz/
Here
You don't need to log in, but if you do you may reject songs you don't care for and the system will learn your preferences. You may pick the Jazz streams by decade or other categories. Play along; start by alternate listening and playing through the verses, picking up whatever you can. Try NOT to think too much about chord roots, scale tonics, positions, or fingering - let your ear and hands figure these things out. With progress, try alternate listening and playing every four bars. A few months of that should help reorganize what you know and what you will learn into a more hierarchical conceptualization that requires much less detail thinking for improvisation.Last edited by pauln; 07-27-2024 at 04:13 PM.
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To add to this, pivoting is a technique I want to explore for playing arpeggios in a small space on the neck. Pivoting just involves when ascending playing the next note an octave down. Originally Posted by BreckerFan
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I am working on this method today, but not quite sure if I was doing it the right way, is it possible that you take a short video of you doing this practice? Would be very predicated, thanks! Originally Posted by wolflen
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I was accidentally doing the pivoting practice recently as well. Yeah it's really a big tool. Originally Posted by charlieparker
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ahh..vids not possible...but Originally Posted by Peng1026
ok..Eb note..8th fret
major...Eb G Bb..8 8 6
minor...Eb Gb Bb..8 7 6
dim..Eb Gb A 8 7 5
aug..Eb G B 8 8 7
dom..Eb G Db no fifth 8 8 9
it can now resolve into Ab major 8 9 8 a cycle of fourths can be used from here
also note..the A whole tone scale A B C# D# are all notes in the Eb exercise and resolves nice into Ab major
hope this is clear..and helps
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wolflen, that part was fairly clear, it's the second part of your regimen (below) that requires explanation. This is the point at which you start to regret you suggested this. Originally Posted by wolflen
Originally Posted by wolflen
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if I may … Originally Posted by Mick-7
wolflen, that part was fairly clear, it's the second part of your regimen (below) that requires explanation. This is the point at which you start to regret you suggested this.
Eb F G Ab Bb C D Eb
Eb F Gb Ab Bb C Db Eb
D# E F# G# A# B C# D#
Eb F G A Bb C D Eb
etc
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