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.

Increase Your Playing Speed

One obstacle that people face when learning how to play the guitar is how to play songs that require you to play fast.  I had the same issue. No matter how much I practiced, it seemed like I could never get to the speed I needed to be at. Then, I happened upon a few sites that said similar things that made sense.

Most of these sites suggested getting a metronome. This is a great idea. I own a small, digital metronome/tuner that I use to keep time and increase my speed while learning new music. It has several settings for different note types, such as quarter, eighth, eighth triplets, and sixteenth. It also has a range of 30 beats per minute (bpm) to 230 bpm. When I’m learning anything new, depending on the complexity, I start between 30 and 60 bpm. After every successful run through the riff with the proper picking technique, no buzzing notes, and no missed notes or mistakes, I then increase the timing by 5 bpm.

Some of you may have tried this and failed because you get to a certain point and then all you do is make mistakes. This is fine because you’re still learning. Two tips you may want to try is to keep pushing up 5 bpm more to about 10-15 bpm higher than the rate you were messing up on. Still messing up? That’s okay…go back down to the setting you messed up on. You should be able to play at that rate. If not, no worries, here’s another great tip: take the piece you’re working on and break it down into 2, 3, or 4 not chunks and play those without the metronome until you master each one. Next, put two pieces together and play them until mastered. Do the same with the rest of the pieces, then, put them all together. Does the piece you’re trying to learn seem easier? It should because you just trained your eyes, ears, and hands to play the piece in smaller pieces. Now, turn on the metronome. I’ve experienced gains of 30 bpm just by doing this same technique.

If  you’re still struggling to reach a certain rate or get passed a rate you’re stuck on, take a break and let your mind and hands rest. Coming back to it after a break usually helps.

My advice…take all these tips and use them well. If you use these tips to practice new music, you’ll notice yourself picking up speed in no time. Another thing you’ll notice is what I call the “Matrix Affect”, named after the movie The Matrix because you’ll notice that no matter how fast you increase the beats per minute, it never seems to get any faster. That’s because you are tuning your mind, ears, and hands to perform the piece where your mind stretches the beats out so that it appears you have plenty of time to play each note when in actuality you truly are playing faster.