Fretboard visualisation - who uses CAGED/3nps

Matt_McG

re: the fretboard 'lighting up' with a view of the notes for the appropriate chord you are playing.

I can do that, or at least have a sense of what it feels like, but only in a super limited way. So, there are certain chords or scales that have come up a lot, especially those I am used to sight-reading in when reading classical guitar. Basically from one flat, through to 2 or 3 sharps. When I am playing chords from those scales, I can mostly visualise them on the neck without thinking very literally in terms of CAGED shapes.

Which all sounds great, but really, it doesn't happen for me enough for me to fluidly improvise over 'changes' in the way that a good jazz player can. Which is why I'm a mediocre improviser (over changes) at best, and a terrible one, at worst.

If you asked me to play, say, over Abm7b5, I'd have no clue without slavishly working around CAGED shapes (although that's still pretty handy). But if you said, Emaj7, or Am, say. I wouldn't really be thinking in terms of shapes. I'd just kind of 'see' the notes.

I imagine for a really good jazz player, they have that for almost any common chord/tonality they might encounter.

carlos

>> Abm7b5

That's pretty easy because I know that shape with roots on bottom for 6th, 5th and 4th strings. Just don't ask me to play the inversions off the cuff...

Matt_McG

Yeah, that's what I meant. I'd have to think of it in terms of chord shapes. I wouldn't just be able to connect together the notes of that chord across the neck without thinking fairly carefully about reference points. Whereas if I was doing that for Cmaj7, to pick an especially easy example it's just 'laid out' in the mind's eye.

Brad

matt1973 said:

Ha! Yes thought it might be. That was the subeject of my first lesson with Mike. It’s probably worth revisiting actually. Given that the lesson in question was over twenty years ago.

i studied Popular Music at a place called Bretton Hall back in the 1990s’. 

Yeah dig back into it, I reckon you'll be glad if you do! It was like re-learning the guitar at first but well worth the effort, for me anyway... 

 @Matt_McG ; Could it be that you've just not spent enough time with Abm7b5 and it's associated scales/inversions/arps compared to other chords and scales you're more familiar with? Forget about CAGED for the moment, do you know where a m7b5 chord sits in both a major or minor key, how and where it's used?

Matt_McG

Oh sure, that is exactly it.

I was just making the point that the skills of someone like Holdsworth are built on practice, and even for someone like me, I can do some of that fretboard visualisation because I've played enough in certain keys, and especially _read_ music enough in certain keys/tonalities etc that I can visualise them really easily. And for those that I've not played so much, or as intensely, I need to use techniques like CAGED as hooks to help me navigate.

Clashman

What makes one note played after another unacceptable to our ears and do we know if
the sequence of notes is unacceptable or intorable to everyone?.

stratman3142

Matt_McG said:

Oh sure, that is exactly it.

I was just making the point that the skills of someone like Holdsworth are built on practice, and even for someone like me, I can do some of that fretboard visualisation because I've played enough in certain keys, and especially _read_ music enough in certain keys/tonalities etc that I can visualise them really easily. And for those that I've not played so much, or as intensely, I need to use techniques like CAGED as hooks to help me navigate.

I find that there are those things that are used regularly, which become fluent, and those where it's necessary to assimilate and plan.

In a previous SotM, I heard things as Phrygian Dominant (link below) and thought I knew that scale. I quickly discovered I was really only passably fluent of the Phrygian Dominant in the key of E, whereas the track was in G. I spent quite a lot of time getting it into my heard and exploring the melodic lines so that I was temporality fluent. But now it's gone again and, put on the spot again, I might get by but I'd be tentatively groping around a bit until I got it into my head again.

http://www.thefretboard.co.uk/discussion/116827/solo-of-the-month-31-and-the-winner-is#latest

Brad

@Matt_McG ah I get what you're saying now, it's the same for us all!