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I never realised how important that is until i started with jimmy bruno's guitar workshop.
Cycling in fourth in one position for example in the 3rd fret low G just helps visualising relationships between keys!
I will definetly do that in the 4 other positions ,i'm surprised no one highlighted the importance of this!
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09-17-2016 12:27 PM
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If you pick a few tunes that cycle through a number of keys, like All The Things You Are, Body and Soul, and Cherokee, you'll end up playing just about all the keys anyways, so that's another way to practice them.
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Except that for ATTYA it jumps from Abmajor to Cmajor , which are a bit distant in the circle !
Originally Posted by dasein
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it's actually talked about a good bit. You'll notice it more, now that you've awoken from the matrix. Welcome! :-) Originally Posted by mooncef
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Dunno what you're talking about. I know only 3 positions
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Here's a diagram I just made (using Neck Diagrams software) of the five CAGED positions, key of C. I learned the "five fingerings" from Jimmy Bruno. (Well, I first learned them as a kid but they weren't called the five fingerings OR CAGED then, at least not within earshot.) I'm not used to thinking of them in terms of CAGED and am not sure I have them right. Could someone double-check my work? ;o)
Attachment 35909
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Visualizing 3 that doesn't overlap is easier - more space and less messy. You can play in between 2 of them instead thinking about a new isolated pattern there.
edit: I only meant visualizing. Of course it's important to get as many fingerings as possible practiced to bones.Last edited by emanresu; 09-17-2016 at 06:08 PM.
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If you're talking about what Herb Ellis teaches in his "shape system," I know that. (I call Herb's shapes F, D, and A, though he does not.) It's handy. And it's really 9 shapes, but only 3 for major chords. Fred Sokolow covers a lot of the same ground in his "Fretboard Roadmaps" books. Originally Posted by emanresu
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I'm still a big fan of Reg's 7 fingerings, just because they're so consistent and easy to change on the fly.
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They're useful too. Definitely worth knowing. There's a much-posted video of Kurt Rosenwinkel demonstrating them as his approach. Originally Posted by Shadow of the Sun
One reason I'm focusing on CAGED now is that I'm deliberately learning to play all the chords of a tune in one position.And this mainly so I can then feel comfortable playing over all the changes of a tune in one position, then another, then another.
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It's easier to remember exceptions to a rule than remember everything :-) Originally Posted by mooncef
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OK, I learned these when I was a kid, when my playing was diatonic and scale based (pop/blues/rock/folk etc). So it's in my DNA. Many years later, I can still play these shapes with my eyes closed in any key, linked all the way u and down without a break, 8ths at 360 bpm (hey, I thought that's what you had to do! Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
). But turning to Jazz when I did, I not only realised that all this scale practice was useless, but it had actually ingrained certain habits, both physical and mental, that I felt hindered my journey into Jazz.
I mean, when you realise that everything has to relate to the chord of the moment, you start to learn every inversion of these chords, and their arpeggios as your new ground zero. Problem is, there are 4, not 5 inversions of most of the chords we tend to need. Makes sense, we have 4 fingers, we learn 4 note versions of chords. Even if you see Ab7b9b13#11 - we try to represent that with 4 notes (turns out it's often a good thing too!).
So, when I tried to shoehorn all my chord and arp knowledge into the 5 CAGED positions (which I thoroughly did over a very long time), there was always a chord/arp form that was the ugly sister - just so there was no gaps and it all lined up with the scale positions. Of course, by this stage I'd thoroughly learned all the scale types I though I had to know too- in 5 positions naturally.
But as the years wore on, in the back of my mind I wished I had started with chords/arps, and learned to "decorate" those in the same 4 positions as the chord inversions. I don't ever play scales, I play dozens of ways of embellishing arps instead. They might sound like scales sometimes, but they're not. They are arps with diatonic or chromatic embellishments, yep, the stuff that Jazz language is actually made of.
Mind you, I have ended up learning everything I know in 5 CAGED positions, because it's a habit. But in the throes of improv, I get by with 4, using drop 2 inversions as my guideposts. I can kid myself and say that the less important 5th position completes the fingerboard, leaves no gaps and gives me alternative fingerings (which I do use admittedly), but if were teaching someone what I considered a shortcut to my current knowledge, I think I would teach everything around the 4 inversions. The astute among you will know that it doesn't mean dropping, say, the "D" position from CAGED to leave just CAGE to learn. That is because you leave out different positions depending on the chord. Even blues scales, you still will play 5 different "shapes", but not for every chord.
I'm talking about functional Bop based tunes, not CST non functional modern tunes. But even there, a 4 position system should yield enough options to express all the music you have in you. Heck, just thinking this out loud is making me think I should wean myself off the 5th position. Anyone wanna talk me out of this?
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I've been doing a lot with four inversions lately. Kind of what reg advocates. Kind of a "learn the basics for important scale-types' arps BEFORE learning every other conceivable fingering iteration". I mean, if you have a fixed amount of time, is it more important to learn SEVEN or TWELVE iterations for each diatonic arpeggio of the major scale BEFORE learning some basic inversions in melodic minor and other scales? You only have one lifetime. He basically relegates the in-between stuff to "things you work on when working on reading". Fundamentals first. Originally Posted by princeplanet
I'm talking about functional Bop based tunes, not CST non functional modern tunes. But even there, a 4 position system should yield enough options to express all the music you have in you. Heck, just thinking this out loud is making me think I should wean myself off the 5th position. Anyone wanna talk me out of this?
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Hey, Herb Ellis only used three! (I call them "FAD" but Herb did not.) In a way, the three shape approach is easier for moving along the neck. I tend to think this way more when I play---I've spent a lot of time with Herb's music and guitar books. (Fred Sokolow teaches something similar in his "Fretboard Roadmap" books.) Originally Posted by princeplanet
I'm talking about functional Bop based tunes, not CST non functional modern tunes. But even there, a 4 position system should yield enough options to express all the music you have in you. Heck, just thinking this out loud is making me think I should wean myself off the 5th position. Anyone wanna talk me out of this?
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Ha! Yeah, I seem to recall we've had this conversation ages ago, and I'm still stuck on 5, too chicken to let it go.... But 3, hmm, seems pretty old school. Was that from CC? Originally Posted by MarkRhodes
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Here's a pattern when you cycle keys in one position !
the Caged position get cycled too using this pattern !
6/3/7/5/2
(the numbers refer to the scale degree from where the shape starts at the low E)
it position cycle regardless from which position you start so if you start on 2 (dorian shape) it will be 2/6/3/7/5 then it ships by one fret and starts again!
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Naturally one of the reasons you grok CAGED is that you can play all keys in any given single position. With a 4 pattern system (according to chord), then you'd naturally need to cover an extra 2 or 3 frets either side of a given position in order to access all keys. This is an obvious downside, but then a possible upside would be the symmetry or regularity of fitting 4 patterns to 12 keys, you cycle through each pattern 3 times before you've cycled all 12 keys....
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Probably. Kessel's book had only four major shapes, but one was Bb, so he wasn't thinking CAGED. (Joe Pass taught CAGED but I don't know if that's how he learned.) Originally Posted by princeplanet
The three-shape approach is easy to see on the guitar and very convenient for rock, blues, and soul. Just think of the "F" shape at the first fret. (The "F" chord most of us learned starting out.) That has an F, or root note, on the high E. The next F (up from there) is at the sixth fret on the B string---the "D" shape. The next F up is on the G string, 10th fret. That's what I call "long A" but Herb called that shape one. You have that open-"A"-type barre with the root on the high E. That's the same F we started on, so the pattern repeats from the first F, just up an octave.
It's easy to connect triads along the neck this way. (Herb did a lot of this in his playing. It's very useful for blues but it's not limited to that.)
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The way I always saw it, back in the day, was that 2 shapes were major (E and A forms), and 2 were minor (the G and C forms, but really thinking of them as E minor and A minor). You'd use the relative major/minor of each of them to have shapes you could play over anything in all 4. 5th one is a " 'sposed type thing. Like eating your vegetables :-)
At a certain point though, for me, the thing of naming shapes based on major chords is just a problem, especially when you get into jazz. I always thought having a pattern per-scale degree, like Rosenwinkel or reg , would be a huge change, but it's actually simplified a lot for me. Always "thinking" from the same finger makes parallel relationships especially easy to see. Same thing with visually seeing things as modes or inversions rather than disparate tonic roots. Seems more complex on paper/in theory, but in practice, is the opposite.Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 09-20-2016 at 12:16 PM.
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I take it you're more into more a "modern" CST approach to improv? I mean, do you think of chord tones in terms of where they are in the scale fingerings? Or do you see chord tones first and the scale tones in between? Just curious about how you 7 position guys conceive things. Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
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Honestly, I am a chord/chord tone guy, and I imagine that reg is as well. Chords are built from scales , and scales are simply restacked 13ths right? It's not as much PHILOSOPHICAL approach as a very PHYSICAL one. Fingering doesn't necessarily dictate philosophy.
Calling one position Ionean and the position above Dorian etc is an imperfect verbalization of what is a physical understanding more than a theoretical approach. It doesn't mean that you're thinking modally necessarily.
When I'm playing the piano, in a five-finger G-type position, and the key signature changes , I'm not required to move my hand to a new position to understand that F# changed to F natural. I'm also not required to "think" of my key of C major as being G mixolydian, purely based on where my fingers are.
In the same way, you shouldn't be required to think of where the root of C is to stay in position, while changing the fingerings/key signature. But honestly, that's mostly the way we learn to think about these things from the books and methods I've seen. One isn't necessarily more contrived than the other, in my opinion.
Again, calling one position a certain name based on the lowest pitch (naming it modally) doesn't necessarily mean that you're thinking modally in everything that you play. It certainly may not be perfect in that regard, but it DOES have the added benefit of giving you the modal reference for anything, whenever you want or need it. You certainly don't get that with calling something "pattern 1A" or "E-form". It's really all minor semantics imo.
Interestingly, where reg calls a fingerings G Ionean and A Dorian, Rosenwinkel says "I just think of this position as G , and this one as A". Uncanny similarities, minus the modal naming convention. I think the modal labeling is probably the most confusing thing for people looking at this honestly.
On the other hand, the most beneficial side benefit of what reg does is that you learn chord theory automatically, by default, almost without thinking about it, while learning the fingerings, simply because the beginning-finger reference is the same for each scale degree. So, the fifths, thirteenths etc. are always in the same place, and you can see them physically altered for each scale degree/chord.Last edited by matt.guitarteacher; 09-20-2016 at 01:16 PM.
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Cool, yeah, I often wondered whether Reg and others like having 7 fingerings under the fingers as a help when reading. I think I used to practice 7 as well, where the extra 2 "in between" fingerings were between what I call the the Mixo and Aoelian, and the other b/n Locrian and Dorian (so, ionian , I guess ...). I used to use them in my Rock days because they were 3 nps.
These days I doubt whether I play more than 3 diatonic notes in a row without some kind of chromaticism. In fact I don't even think about diatonic patterns at all these days, every PC i play against a chord doesn't really resemble a scale fingering, just a bunch of notes played in a certain order that somehow sound right against, and around, the chord I'm seeing, usually a drop 2 form that lights up to guide me. Even when playing modally, I just don't think of scales. I used to and really hated the way it sounded. Just my hangup, I was trying to get away from sounding too Rock, even sounding like Fusion was irking me...
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yup. "Does it sound good?" Is rule #1 (& rule #2) for music theory. I have a similar pool of chromatic notes (though I'm sure not add diverse as yours) which seem to sound good as well, mostly from chromatic/melodic concepts. Originally Posted by princeplanet
These days I doubt whether I play more than 3 diatonic notes in a row without some kind of chromaticism. In fact I don't even think about diatonic patterns at all these days, every PC i play against a chord doesn't really resemble a scale fingering, just a bunch of notes played in a certain order that somehow sound right against, and around, the chord I'm seeing, usually a drop 2 form that lights up to guide me. Even when playing modally, I just don't think of scales. I used to and really hated the way it sounded. Just my hangup, I was trying to get away from sounding too Rock, even sounding like Fusion was irking me...
Reg would be additionally busting our chops to take the additional steps to understand the harmonic implications of those chromatic pitches as well, since we play a harmonic/comping instrument. I get some of the baby levels of that, but have a ways to go yet.
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Yeah, I've read those posts and struggled to understand exactly what he's saying, something about about references, relationships, modal mixture.... Originally Posted by matt.guitarteacher
And then someone says "But Reg, why can't they just be passing notes and leave it at that?". Which is where I'm still at TBH.
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They ARE "just passing notes"..... sort of,.....but they very often imply something larger about the harmony as well. Originally Posted by princeplanet
Yeah, I've read those posts and struggled to understand exactly what he's saying, something about about references, relationships, modal mixture.... And then someone says "But Reg, why can't they just be passing notes and leave it at that?". Which is where I'm still at TBH.
If you watch him comp, he basically can play melodic/chromatic comping lines, almost like a chord melody, better than some of us can play single-note chromatic. He literally does hear the "implications" and "possible implications" in chromatic/melodic lines. I ain't there yet. :-)
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