The hardest notes to find on the guitar
gitori.com
gitori.com
There are reasons why folks know the names of notes in some positions better than others.
When I was playing a lot of bass for folks in low rent with bands that were playing standard music and never rehearsing, I generally only paid attention to the low string and worked my parts out (often on the fly) around the relative pitches.
If you're trying to keep up with the bass part on a song you've never heard before while performing it on stage, it's much more relevant (and far easier/faster) to know the position of the minor 3 note of the scale than it is to know what note is the minor 3.
Over the decades I play a lot more piano, and that changes. I play a lot of blues and jazz but am quite poor at reading typical rep for the instrument. While I started out mostly playing using chord fingerings (and inversions), the more I play the more specific I can get on my understanding of actual notes. Because I've been playing a lot of clarinet (which forces me to transpose a whole lot, including reading a part and transposing on the fly), the names of specific notes has gotten a whole lot more important, but also easier with practice.
On the pedal steel (which I have only been playing for a decade on and am still coming to terms with), while I can pull all that knowledge I am still usually playing based on a notes position- I know what string/lever combo is going to get the 6 note in a given scale rather than thinking "I need to play an A to get this C chord to be a C6, and that's this position on the neck with the BC pedals down or that position with the LKR lever pushed.
All that is to say, it's okay to not know the names of notes if you understand their function related to the melody.
One of the things that is bittersweet about learning a song is that it can take the magic out of the song; instead of just hearing it, I am thinking in chord shapes, positions, lead lines, etc.
I can't even Phish because if I'm on drugs I fall into listening-like-I-need-to-play-the-next-chord. Whereas a lot of songwriter music I can listen-like-I'm-reading-underegrad-poetry
I do feel that way about tetris, too. I think the reason I enjoy older jazz standards on bass is playing them is a little like solving a suduko- I can get a satisfying answer without much more than the melody. That doesn't work for modern rock where the riff is key. That kind of "well, it sounds okay but it doesn't line up with my idea of what makes sense" is my own anti-magical-feeling.
Like, I know what a secondary dominant is because I've had to use it in blues turn arounds- I didn't know that's what some folks would call it, but I knew that in the key of G, I'd often play an A instead of the Am.
And I think that the vocabulary should describe what folks do rather than the doings being driven by the vocabulary.
Most guitar players (and improv folks) that I know have much more theory that the folks who are reading but who generally don't think about what the function of their line is in a larger song.
If you're playing by memory and ear, you have to have some concepts because you can't just read a part.
Those concepts -are- the theory.
At the same time, I wish more folks would learn to read music, or even be literate enough to read lead sheets- my life would be so much easier if folks could just show up and play the thing without spending hours learning from recordings and making whatever kind of esoteric notations they've made up.
Once Davis taught him the concepts he got them immediately, or it might be a chord he knew and played, but didn't know the formal name of. So, he was a brilliant intuitive musician, but didn't have the theory chops of someone who attended Juliard like Davis.
That is what we mean by Hendrix didn't know the theory.
I think there's a number of people who learned to play by ear who just sort of "internalized" theory without needing a formal curriculum.
Is it understanding formal music theory? No, only if you stretch the definition of formal music theory to include what is definitely not formal music theory by any one's definition.
My point is that what he did is what music theory describes, and he definitely arrived there. He most definitely could play the scales and the modes, even if he never used the word dorian.
There is just some allergic reaction to the word that people take to mean something along the lines of demeriting the artistry. Had he learned the diatonic chords would that mean he is no longer a no theory guy, and would that make him worse?
I know thats not what you are saying, but i do see that from the hardcore 'theory is bad' proponents. Is theory the names of the relationship between tones, or the relationships themselves?
I'm a very beginner guitar player (and have been for about 30 years now) and I know a couple of simple songs. If I try to play along with a record, I'm fine until vocals kick in and then I instantly lose track of the beat and find myself strumming to the syllables of whatever the vocalist is singing.
Copy and paste “hello, world” ot install sqlite3 looks like computer science?
Just because something is the Nth lowest first step does not mean it's not a step.
Most of the musicians I know have very minimal theory, ironically even less than folks who can't read.
This makes it hard to compose and study music, since I take a long time to transpose and navigate the harmonic field, but it's a tradeoff that I need to do, my brain doesn't work otherwise.
This is exactly the same for me. The guitar fretboard is essentially synesthesia for me when I hear music. I hear a melody and part of my brain feels the shape of the fingerings as I go. It’s been like this for maybe 30 years or so (I started guitar at a really young age.)
I have no idea if this is common for guitar players though (I assume so? If you’re the sort of player that can play solos, you probably already “audiate” sounds via fingering) but it means I can basically always immediately play a song after hearing it once, even if it’s just the basic melody. I also have what I’d call “weak” perfect pitch (I can easily conjure an E in my head and then figure out from there what note I’m hearing via well-trained relative pitch) so often I can get the exact notes right the first time.
But that feeling of "just knowing" is common among a lot of instruments and players.
I know that if I play some fingering on the clarinet, or jut grab a chord on the pedal steel, or whatever it's going to do what I intend without thinking about naming what I intend to do, just like i don't think about spelling, punctation, or letter position when I type (even though I often need to edit LOL).
So I agree- if I am playing bass with folks I will often just start playing without thinking too much about what notes I am playing beyond trying to decide on the general tonic key of the song.
Before this, I was _mostly_ remembering the "safe" notes, but the occasional stumbles break the flow badly, and the tabs have helped. Surprisingly, since I started doing this, its helped me memorize the scale and make fewer mistakes, generally.
If you practice this thinking it's going to translate to guitar, your wasting time that would be better spent playing guitar.
I recommend you give it a shot and see if it helps you. There's also a couple settings to "invert" the fretboard to your preferences if that's what you prefer.
Lastly, it's really fun to actually play the game with a real guitar. If you click/tap the note on top, it requests mic permissions and you're all set to now play with a real fretboard.
P.S. If you go down the real guitar route, try the Arcade Mode on find the Notes. It's the most fun thing I've ever built...a space invaders style game on the fretboard. But driven with a real guitar.
However, my mental model of the strings is the fattest string on top, not on bottom.
Not for me (lap steel). But then I don't play that in standard tuning; it's one of the few guitar tunings that is not useful at all.
So yeah, some of us are Steve Vais and others like me take months to learn it. To each their own.
Would you please add a non Google sign up?
I completely understand you wanting that. My concern is that I offer a 1 week free trial for all new accounts. There's nothing stopping people from making a new account every week with 10minutemail to use the app for free. Happy to make a "backdoor" email only account for paid users though.
I'm surprised it's not all octave pairs, actually. Maybe if he used a lower threshold it'd emerge more as a pattern.
Which one did you mean?
I wonder if it's because tab usually has "low" strings on the bottom, like in sheet music (lower pitches are at the bottom) and when we (guitarists) are playing chords with melody notes in them (bluegrass, jazz), we talk about the melody notes being on "top".
I wonder if the contrast isn't high enough for some users. Honestly, this is the first time I've gotten this feedback. Maybe try the dark fretboard option? It looks like this:
jk. I'm not that great either.
That 2nd string warp may not get them but they still got a few notes to sort out in their head.
If I have perfect/absolute pitch (very doubtful), it's from having certain pitches absolutely burned into my brain. B-flat and F on brass instruments, C on piano, E on guitar, etc.
I can generally memorize and sing back the exact pitches of any song once I've heard it a few times. If I like the song enough, that pitch memory is forever. I will never sing it in the wrong key ever again and that's actually how I get around in music. I can always play back the original song in my head like a tape recording. I learned the names of some chords a long time ago from my favorite songs and now just know them by heart when I hear them (add9, sus4, minor 7th, etc).
Unfortunately, I cannot do this in reverse and name the notes or do any supernatural tricks like Rick Beato's kid. I would have to hum every individual note for a little while and run through the chromatic scale in my mind to tell you the name.
I think to a large extent, it can be trained. I didn't get started until I was like 8 years old and wasn't always the best student either. I hesitate to call this relative pitch because I don't need to hear an outside reference and I can very easily tell when an instrument is out of tune. I'm somewhere in between, and so are most band kids.
Now that AI is here it's much easier to approach. It won't help fix my finger positioning but it helps a lot with exploring the theory.
I built a library for visualizing and playing everything: https://dsebastien.github.io/music-notation/
Then an Obsidian plugin on top: https://dsebastien.github.io/music-notation/
And an LLM wiki about the theory: https://notes.dsebastien.net/10+Meta/99+AI+Assistant/Wikis/M...
AI slop certainly but it helps me a ton!
I had restarted guitar after a 45 yr absence of playing. Took lessons for 9 months and progressed well, but hit a wall. I was going to look toward AI for help getting over the wall what you did looks promising. Thanks!
Highly recommend it.
The next was discovering the tonal center or 'root' of a song. A lot of gears clicked into place at that point.
If you play the open E string, the octave for this is on the D string 2nd fret.
The easiest way I found was to think of the notes on each of the strings are a repeated pattern starting in different positions.
Start with the whole notes (no sharps or flats)
EFGABCD ABCDEFG
Once you've got them down you can learn the sharps/flats
Context:
* in USA & Canada, notes are a-b-c-d-e-f-g
* Where I'm born though, due to Germanic tradition and influence, b is called h. b-flat is b.
* Given that most teachers start you with C major, it was taught as c-d-e-f-g-a-h
* And of course, where I'm born, you're first taught solfago (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si/ti-do)
So my brain never really learned to think of musical notes as "alphabet". My natural inclination is solfago, and when I use the single letters, my brain interprets them as random string of letters that you have to think about every time (given that for whatever reason "H" is between "A" and "C"), rather than just alphabet. It's like I have two parallel sets of neural pathways: Alphabet - no problem, I can do it forward and backward reflexively, vs Musical Notes - stop all trains, engage upper brain functions, this is the difficult one with no sense or reason.
Grrr, Germans :=D
... that being said, I'll try the app :)