1 What Result Can You Expect?
If you do the daily exercises, these are the skills that you will acquire
I’ll be honest with you. The roadmap I give you is not a shortcut. Frankly, I’m tired of seeing books like “Guitar Fretboard: Memorize The Fretboard In Less Than 24 Hours” being written and published. Nobody memorizes the fretboard in less than 24 hours. It takes honest work. You can find success in applying what you learn in this book in the very first week. But it can take a minimum of a month to really build a good foundation.
Every student is more than capable of climbing this mountain of fretboard mastery. However, it’s the teacher’s responsibility to figure out a strategic roadmap that will get them to the top. The method in this book is something I used when teaching my high school guitar class. My students had only been playing for about 4 months when I started them on the beginner-level roadmap. I had a few advanced students that did the intermediate track (see Part III).
The skills that they acquired were:
- The ability to immediately know where any barre chord or power chord is on the neck by name. For example, you will know the 3 locations for the C5 power chord and have the freedom to pick which one suits the song.
- The ability to play chord progressions using barre chords and power chords. You will be able to decipher what “1 – 4 – 5 in the key of G” means and you will be able to play it in a variety of ways on the fretboard.
If you continue with the intermediate track, you will get a full and complete mastery of the fretboard. Knowing where each note lies on the fretboard really opens up the fretboard in ways that you won’t fully understand until you actually have that knowledge. You will be able to play arpeggios better. You will play scales with less errors. You will be able to improvise in ways that will surprise you—crafting phrases instead of just noodling scales.
The reason why I am not going to show you any shortcuts is because I’m betting that you have already tried them. Shortcuts can work in a pinch. I don’t want you to avoid them. They can help, yes. But your foundation needs to be strong and shortcuts are better suited after you have done the foundational work.
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