“If you only understand something one way, you don’t understand it at all.”
Marvin Minsky, AI pioneer
I hate memorization. I don’t know about you, but I would rather understand the basics really well than memorize a bunch of complicated patterns that I don’t truly understand.
One of the things that drew me to mathematics, engineering, and computer science is that nearly all of the advanced concepts are built by combining simpler ones. From a small number of axioms, we can reconstruct everything else. I made it through four years of undergraduate work in electrical engineering and a six year Ph.D program in EE/CS without explicitly memorizing anything. Sure, the important results etched their way into my neural pathways over time, but I never spent time memorizing them. Instead, I spent my time understanding how they emerged out of combinations of simpler results and practicing how to reconstruct them.
The same idea applies to music theory and the logic of the guitar fretboard. Most of what we memorize in music theory results logically from the ways in which you can logically subdivide a 2:1 frequency ratio (the octave) crossed with the geometric logic of the mostly-4ths tuning of the fretboard. This sounds way more complicated than it really is.
In Fret Science, my goal is to explain the patterns we guitarists use most often (triads, arpeggios, pentatonic scales, and diatonic modes) as the logical result of combining a few simple, easy-to-remember building blocks. If you fully internalize the building blocks, you will be able to instantly reconstruct the right pattern under your fingers, no matter where your hands are on the fretboard.
Eventually, the patterns you use the most will be memorized organically. But you’ll never need to refer to a chord, arpeggio, or scale diagram again. And as you build up your library of higher-level patterns, you’ll end up with an almost superhuman ability to pivot between those patterns on the fly. And that’s when you’ll feel like you truly understand the fretboard.
After all, if you can’t reconstruct concepts from the basics, you don’t really understand what’s going on at all.
First, begin by understanding how the smaller interval between the G and B strings affects geometric patterns on the fretboard.
Fret Science 