Fretboard Memorization 1 (The Bass Strings: E, A, D)

Experienced beginner guitar players often find themselves with the ability to:

• Play most (or all) of the open position “cowboy” chords with confidence
• Be able to strum along to several of their favorite songs
• Fingerpick a few songs or a simple chord progression

But after this stage, they often ask themselves, “What’s next?”.

Here is what’s next!

1. Fretboard Knowledge
2. Musical Understanding
3. Ear Development
4. Intermediate to Advanced playing techniques

This course tackles the first three.

As for “intermediate to advanced playing techniques”, there are so many different techniques that are a part of learning the guitar. Some genres, like metal, will focus on a few of them like sweep picking and fast alternate picking. Whereas other genres, like folk, will focus on techniques like fingerpicking. So technique is something that is very personal because your path will depend on the type of you music that you want to play. I recommend that you find a teacher that can help you with this specific area.

Does “fretboard knowledge” and “musical understanding” include learning how to read sheet music (ie. standard notation)?!?

Learning to read sheet music (standard notation) really helped me learn the fretboard. However, there is a lot of resistance among guitarists to acquiring this particular skill. Therefore, in this course, I label these lessons as optional. I will say that there is a simple misunderstanding about learning how to read sheet music. Some beginner guitarists learn that notes can be played in different positions on the guitar and therefore it’s impossible to learn standard notation due to this fact. That’s not true. The secret to learning how to read is to begin with first position. When you isolate the playing to a single position, there is only one possible position for each note (by virtue of isolating yourself to one position on the guitar). Therefore, learning how to read is actually very easy.

However, it is not necessary to becoming a great musician.

The most important thing to becoming a great musician is developing a musician’s ear.

Do you have a question for me? Email me at chris@justshowup.vip