Hey guys, welcome to the short podcast where we'll discuss the way to navigate the fretboard.
Namely, I have three main systems I use and I even have an acronym for this.
You know, me and Mark at Jazz Guitar lessons, and we use the acronym three way Fretboard Navigation system, three way FNS for short.
So what I want to do in the podcast is describe the three approaches, some of their benefits, some of the drawbacks, and also perhaps expose you to some of the ideas about each.
Ways to address the guitar fretboard.
Because of course we have six strings and like 20, 24 frets.
So there's different ways to compare it to mental eyes.
I can't say that word in English.
I can't say it.
Compartmentalized would be influential.
Create compartments, create subdivisions.
So let's get going.
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Before we get started, I'll tell you the three main ways and we'll dig deeper into each.
So the first one is the position system, the vertical way sticking my left hand in a single place and then playing all of your valuable notes within that range.
So that's pretty simple.
You guys have probably gotten your entry point into jazz guitar and playing scales.
With that way of looking at the fretboard, the second way is going to be horizontal, and I'll dig more into that later.
And the third way is sort of a blend of both approaches, which I call the diagonal.
So this is a podcast.
It's not very visual.
There's also an associated YouTube video with that lesson.
So you can see hands on what I'm doing on the camera.
But still, if you're listening to this in your car or walking the dog or whatever or in the shower, you may be, it's, it's a good refresher or a good mental model to think of how to address the fingerboard.
Thus, number one, let's just begin with the vertical approach.
Assume I set up my left hand on the fretboard and I arrange for my four fingers on the fretboard to align perfectly with four frets.
That would be the definition of position, if you will.
And furthermore, I will add to this that we can cheat out with the two external fingers.
So namely my index can go out one fret and my pinky can go out one fret.
This means that my left hand can without moving laterally.
Left or right, can cover a total of six frets.
so four fingers plus one plus one on the left, one on the right.
And for the six strings, this is, a big range.
This is like two octaves and a half.
This is pretty much what, say saxophone players have access to on their instrument.
It's a big, big range to cover.
So people say, I'm just going to do everything position.
There's some truth to that.
There's some benefits to doing that.
And the main benefit is that if I am in a position, there is no note duplication if I'm looking for a certain pitch.
So it's a C-Note at this certain frequency, it should be only found in one location, with the exception of when I stretch out the six frets.
Then I'm encountered twice, could I?
So let me think about this.
Yes.
Ultimately, because of the way the Gene B strings are tuned, you would get that six frets apart.
You would get that that same pitch.
But other than that, if you don't stretch out, you will be fine with one pitch, one location.
This, aids in the development of learning or quickly accessing scales without saying, well, there's five places where that actual pitch is on the guitar.
Which should I pick?
Well, you never go down.
You stick your left hand to the position and you have your scale and you have the whole world.
So you have the chromatic scale on two octaves.
You have all the arpeggios, all scales, everything, all the music that's ever been played, in this register, in this range is all available.
It's crazy.
Right?
So really, really good.
And the way people go about extending that knowledge is that they will learn several blocks, namely a position, system would be the Cage system, which is an acronym for Cagney Ed, which are the open chord positions.
So they look like these open chords, and it allows us to create five distinct places on the fretboard in which we stick our hands.
And we just play the scale.
So it's a matter of learning the pattern of dots, and then you're all set.
Of course, there's more that goes into playing music than just that, but that's a that's a good entry point, another system that that's a bit more refined that I use.
It's called, I guess the Berkeley system or the William Levitt the Modern Methods system, which has seven positions.
it's not any better or worse, but it fills in two gaps that the cage system did not have.
so it's like, learn it.
Take it easy, guys.
Just learn it.
You're right.
you can see this in the vault on the fellowship three link in description for the tabs.
I guess it's in the key of C or G.
I don't know, it's fully tabbed over all the seven positions.
There's even a video of me playing this, like, 15 years ago on YouTube with my blue shirt.
And it's there it is.
Those are the positions, caveats.
This approach, has a warning and it also has an added benefit I'll get to.
So the warning is when people first get into jazz and they get intermediate, they believe they have to learn everything in the position because it's more efficient.
It's maybe more efficient in terms of locating a note, but it's not necessarily in terms of phrasing.
Case in point, watch really good jazz guitarist like Wes Montgomery, Kenny Burrell, Pat Metheny.
They will not stay in a position for the sake of staying in the position.
What dictates where the left hand goes is the phrasing or the line where it takes it.
It's not because the notes we would need are not available, it's just mean that it would be better phrased in a in a shift.
Right.
So that's that's a big drawback.
Like don't look at a thing and go, oh yeah, I'm learning bebop heads now right?
I've heard this a million times, by the way.
I'm learning Donna Lee.
And first I have to learn Donnelly in this position.
And then the next one.
The next one, I need you.
You know, whoever Jobe Loeb, jazz mentor online, told me I need to learn Donnelly in at least five positions.
And here's my take on this.
How about we learn Donnelly in one way, which may go through several positions, because certain phrases will lend themselves better to certain skill positions.
The fingerings will will be easier.
The the trill are going to be easier on the hands.
It's going to be faster and more appropriate for the the accents and the, well, the phrases, the musical phrases.
So let's do that way so that maybe there is a bar or two of Donnelly that's here, and I'm pointing in the in the empty.
You can't see me on the podcast, but I'm here.
And then maybe bar three or 4 or 5 and six are over there, and maybe I come back and I have a slight shift of one finger.
So here's a drawback.
Don't become pedantic with positions.
That's it.
Learn them, do all the patterns.
And here's the added benefit or the secret sauce to this.
When I got into the positions and really nailed him, one of my instructors, really smart Gary, said okay, yes, you got the positions, but now you have to link them.
Okay.
So whenever I'm in a position, I always considered a position that would be below it.
So to the left on the fretboard and the one that would be above it to the right on the fretboard with a single finger shift.
It could be a half step shift, typically like a one fret, or it could be different.
It doesn't really matter.
But the point is, it's never about that thing in isolation.
It's that skill position and where it could potentially go up or down.
So therefore, instead of being stuck with that four frets, I have the four frets plus the four frets below that in the four frets above that.
So basically I wind up with, you know, just thinking of a single position, I wind up with an 8 to 10 fret coverage of the fretboard, which is like the entire fretboard, if you don't mind.
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All right, let's dive back into the episode.
Let's move on to the second way.
And it's going to be pretty easy.
Pretty fast is the horizontal way.
The mic good Rick book.
The Advancing guitarist talks about this at length.
He has method know how to decipher it and set it up.
I'll give you the raw tldr feedback on this.
You look at the fretboard, you pick the key, assume it's G major, and line up all of the notes of the G major scale on a single string between threads zero and fret 12, right, open string D for 12 or above.
The only thing that will come out of this is the mapping out of the whole steps and a half steps.
If you look at the major scale, you have two half steps between the note seven and one in between the note three and four, right.
That's it.
That's what you're looking at.
And just playing the scales like this is pretty easy.
You will nail it in 10s and then you'll now what?
Well, here's a now what?
And what's good Rick proposes in his book, it says you should put a chord on like a vamp or riff or, you know, a comping of sorts, even on a mode.
Or the mode can be the major scale, or it could be a blues, whatever.
And then we improvise.
Why is that?
Because with that's that small constraint of just a single string at a time, which he calls me good recalls.
The units are the units that the instrument with a single string, on the unit are.
If I don't make music, it sounds terrible because that's all I have to do.
I go up, it's higher in pitch, I go down slower in pitch, and I don't have access to my good old like patterns or muscle memory.
Like, I really got a mean.
And here when I'm playing for this to make sense.
So improvising lots on one string at a time is a really good idea for hearing mini melodies and seeing how far the jumps are melodically.
If I go from the tonic of the piece, the one to the five, six or seventh note, it's a high jump and it's like ten frets, like you got to go way up.
So since the technique is not really relevant or we don't need a lot of technique, all we have left is focusing on the music, on the ideas and making it sound good.
Okay, so that's a caveat.
The thing is.
Yeah.
Single strings.
So what?
Do it on one string today.
Move to the next string tomorrow.
And the day after I move to the next string.
Cetera.
Improvise on the same, tune or progression or even on a single chord with a looper pedal that works super well.
So doing that maps out the fretboard in a way that's completely the contrast or the opposite.
Or the the film negative of the positions system.
It's the other way around vertical versus horizontal.
Right?
That's it.
the, the main benefit and the like, the holy grail of that approach will be to map two strings at once to adjacent strings.
That's where the magic is, in my opinion, in the Trig book, in that after I have these two strings and I play a lot of lines and I feel super constrained, it's small.
I just had the one string, and once I had a second string, all of these leaps and bounds and lines start to take form.
I'm still only on two strings, but many patterns will emerge mentally, and that's the beauty.
I think this helped me have my positions even more solid on my fretboard, technically speaking.
But again, be mindful.
Don't try to shred on just two strings.
Well, you can if you want.
You can do anything.
But it's it's important to see like how much music can I make according to that constraint, which is a big recurring theme through, you know, jazz guitar lessons, the blog to YouTube, and the ways I've been doing the coaching for the throughout the years.
By the way, if you're looking for an approach, that is no nonsense.
That's more of the meta.
Like organizing my practice approach, building vocabulary, knowing how to add tunes in a jazz vernacular to your repertoire.
Check out the pinnacle method.
It's free.
It's a roadmap, an e-book I wrote along with video series, and you can get that in the description as well.
Now let's dig into the third portion of fretboard navigation.
The three way fretboard navigation system, FNS Vertical and Horizontal have been covered.
Now we get into what I call the diagonal realm.
I don't want to spend too much time on this because the video lends itself better for that.
But I'll tell you the point is to blend both approaches, namely the arithmetic of it or the the algorithm of it is to play more notes per string during the same scales.
For instance, if I play a scale position, if you look at the fretboard, you go like, yeah, on a given string, typically you have 2 or 3 notes.
If I'm playing a pentatonic scale, the typical fingering is two notes per string.
With a diagonal approach, I add notes to the same string before moving on to the next string.
For instance, three note per string is a good way to get into that.
It just yields completely different fingerings, and your left hand moves up quite a bit up and down, not as much as on a single string at a time, but still.
Right.
So you can explore three notes per string.
You can explore four notes per string or four notes on a string.
Then the next is three, four, three, four, three, etc. just to explore and see where where the half notes fall and what kind of fingerings feel more comfortable to you.
It's just a worthwhile exploration and I'll leave you with that thought.
There's a way to organize diagonal fingerings that I love that I worked on extensively.
That is, octave identical fingerings, which is sort of a term I coined, which would mean that if I play CD on a certain string, say the fifth string, the thread three, five and seven, da da da.
If I do my job well, I should wind up with the next sequence of CD with the same fingers an octave up, and then the same fingers and knocked it up again.
I detailed this in the video about the three way fns, in that it it just solidifies the link between my hearing and my fingerings, because muscle memory can kick in.
And in the video I described the I guess it's a G major bebop scale, and I showed it in three different, very fixed positions versus doing it diagonally with octave identical fingerings.
If I do octave identical, it's a no brainer.
Like the fingers repeat themselves.
So it's similar to what a keyboard player experiments.
You play your thing over an octave after you learn that octave, any other octave higher, low can and should be playing by the played by the same digits.
So that's that's how I do.
