Learning the Fretboard – Part Five

It’s been a while since I posted a lesson for this, but I feel this lesson will put Know Your Scales – Revisited in better perspective and pick up where Learning the Fretboard: Part Four left off.

First of all, for my next lesson to make sense, I need to highlight some things I’ve seen from famed instructor Steve Stein and Charlie from Guitar Mastery Method. When practicing your scales, ALWAYS use a metronome. I can’t express that enough. Not only will it help you keep a tempo, but it LITERALLY will help you with your speed. Both Steve and Charlie mention to “play them robotically”. Don’t try to get fancy right away, just GET THEM RIGHT! I was told once “you should only play something as fast as you can play it well.” If you are trying to keep up with Kirk Hammett from Metallica, you’re hindering your learning. Don’t feel bad if you have to set your metronome at 30 bpm. A helpful tip from Anders Mouridsen from Guitar Tricks in his lesson on Easy Open Chord Exercises is to start out slow, bump it up 2 (so if you start at 30 bpm, go up to 32), play, then take it down 1 (down to 31) and keep doing this as you get faster. If you’re patient enough to do this, you WILL see results.

This lesson works with the A minor pentatonic and the C major pentatonic. Both Steve and Charlie have slightly different ways of teaching how to put these two together, but I’ve found a different approach that, in a way, is the best of both of them. What you need to do is, not just learn your pentatonic boxes, but how to be able to put them together. Steve uses a method of practicing called “meandering”, where you take all your boxes and put them together, then, against a metronome, meander around in them without stopping. If you can’t think of where to go next, Steve suggests playing the same note until you think of something. A different way of meandering is taking two boxes at a time and playing both scales up and down while playing against a metronome. This way, you can get to know where each box matches up with the other before TRULY meandering between them.

Below is the A minor/C major pentatonics combined into one scale lesson. Practiced slowly against a metronome, you can start to get the feel of where your fingers should go when playing from one to the next. While this isn’t a set in stone way of how to navigate between boxes, it will help you develop confidence as to where to go next when you do truly meander.

Practice this for about 10 minutes each day using Anders method of increasing speed and you should see dramatic results in a week.