The Well-Understood Fretboard, Vol. 1

No matter what genre of music you play or what kind of guitar you like to use, I’m sure you know that mastering this instrument requires a deep knowledge of the fretboard. All the players we love have acquired the ability to know instantly where the things they want to play exist on the guitar — the same way you don’t think of all the letters you’re saying while you talk.

Learning tunes, licks and transcriptions are great ways to gain vocabulary and technical facilities, but they’re even more valuable if you’re able to understand what you play. This ability lets you use and expand upon licks, lines and chords — to really make them your own. The guitar is a very “visual” instrument but, unlike the piano, understanding how the fretboard works can be a little tricky.

This course will give you the tools to understand and visualize instantly all the basic elements that exist within any major scale or major key: the scale fingerings, the triads and their inversions, the seventh chords and their inversions, as well as their corresponding arpeggios.

I’ve designed this course so that you don’t need theoretical musical knowledge — don’t panic! Any elements of basic theory will be instantly illustrated on the guitar. To embrace this material, you’ll be visualizing melodic and harmonic material at the same time. Eventually, you’ll be able to juggle all those elements as easily as possible.