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Fretboard Wizard
A lot of you folks sing the praises of FW. I did sign up for it and have taken it one and a half times. While the basic and most useful stuff like where the whole and half spaces are in the major and minor keys, and knowing how to transpose via the Nashville system, and a few other things, definitely warrant review from time to time, I got little out of the CAGED section as I cannot play barre chords, nor remember all those confusing scales. I can understand CAGED, it’s pretty simple actually. I have a book from another online program (though I did not take the program) that explains it pretty well. It’s always good to have more than one explanation of something, in my opinion.
But, I am finding FW to be almost too simplistic yet hard to understand (can it be both?). I have trouble relating it to current challenges, like many of you say you can. I am not learning the notes of the fretboard (a few I am), and wouldn’t necessarily know what to do with that information as I don’t read music very well. (I can force myself to learn it by correlating the musical notation with the TAB.) The guess-the-song’s-key-by-ear I totally suck at.
I’m wondering if I have been studying it wrong, How do you use it to get the most out of it?
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This discussion was modified 3 months, 2 weeks ago by
BarbaraM.
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This discussion was modified 3 months, 2 weeks ago by
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14 Replies
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I may get some boos here but my advise is to listen more…..think about it but then listen, really listen. The note thing is a matter of time. I think it helps some people to actively pusue identification and location but for me…I am an ear player…..everything is relative….the 1st degree, aka tonic tone and the progressions changes compared to everything around it. I rarely am lost today and when and if I do it is two notes to get back on track or only one when I am focused. Trust me when I say I used to hate when people would tell me to listen and feel it….but it did happen when I put it into practice…..Perhaps approaching FW with a new perspective focus…is the note higher or lower…may yeild for you some surprising results. I wish we were closer in real life. I see a tremendous advantage for working this out with another guitar player in person if you can find that.
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Thanks for your reply, Jeff. I too wish we lived closer, would love to have some one on one with another guitar player; I seem to live in the musical boonies!
I think I am also an ear player; when I play my recorder or tin whistle I can pick out a tune on either as long as I know what it sounds like. I can even change keys to accommodate the range limitation. I can pick out a tune on the guitar too, but there are more strings so more complexity. I can hear the root note of a song, as long as I have some other notes for context, but knowing “what” note it is by matching it to a note on the low E string is almost beyond me. Especially as the songs Tony picked are old folk songs with twangy voices and fast picking banjos…but I get it, they are probably all in the public domain.
If I look at the tab of a song, I can generally know what the key is by what notes are being played, but it involves counting up from the nut on whatever string, I don’t just know what the note is aside from a few we encounter all the time. And the chord charts we made; are 1, 3, and 5 the basic notes of any chord based on the root being 1? This is not made clear, to me. I don’t know what notes make up a C chord, for example.
I will continue to review FW as long as I am a member. Perhaps one day it will “click”.
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I just wanted to respond to the “old folk songs with twangy voices and fast picking banjos” reference. I hope you weren’t generalizing the whole catalog of songs in the daily challenge rotation. I just wanted to make it clear to anyone who hasn’t been in the program for a full year that there is quite a lot of variety and not very much twangy stuff, but there is an emphasis on blues because of the blues’ awesomeness and their value for teaching guitar.
Hotel Calif, for example is not public domain, and there are countless other songs protected by copyright in the collection. Each one meets a purpose, and while some are not everyone’s choice genre/artist, I can think of a few that I would never sing around my family (due to the lyrics), there aren’t any banjo tunes and I find it quite ingenious how there can be so many little lessons in each selection.
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Pete, I wasn’t totally dissing FW at all; it’s a valuable tool for those of us who never had *any* theory training. It’s just that the songs Tony used for the “key by ear” exercises are of a type I’m not used to hearing so it’s difficult for me to pick up on. (I have nothing against those songs as a genre!) Some of the other songs we have for challenges are more familiar to me (except when they’re not ;-), Wagon Wheel and some of the older rock songs come to mind–but I do understand the need to use material that is in the public domain) that I would have little difficulty determining the key. In fact I can usually pick up a tune on my recorder that I’ve heard only a few times.
Some of my other concerns are some of the lessons/exercises in FW don’t seem to have much practical application, at least for me, as I don’t have others to jam with. If a song I want to learn has chords I find difficult, I either don’t play that song, or use my triad workarounds for them.
Perhaps I’m wrong or being too limiting. I’d love to hear how FW has helped you and others in specific ways that enhance your goals as a guitar player. Me, I’m more focused on getting my 74 year old fingers to behave!
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I’m sorry @BarbaraM you were probably referencing Fretboard Wizard and I can’t speak to FW because I don’ t own it yet. Perhaps I was out of line.
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No worries, Pete!
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Hi Everyone, I’m about 3 months in on TAC really enjoying the challenges. Frustrating at times that’s for sure. I have been hearing a lot of talk about FW especially from Tony as I am doing his 5 day routine challenges every week. Do you advise me to do the FW course before continuing on with the 5 day routines?
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@pfilippettibhaircraft-com you can purchase it whenever you like and go through it any time since it’s a lifetime product. I personally have held off because I didn’t want to overwhelm myself with another program “distracting” me, but it can be beneficial even for beginners and I might be doing myself a disservice by holding out.
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I think only you can answer that question. How far do you feel you have progressed with the regular challenges? What are your goals in learning guitar? FW is a great foundation for further study of theory if you want to go there. And it teaches the CAGED system. And if you’ve had no theory at all, there are musical basics every player should know. I didn’t sign up for it until about 5 or 6 months into TAC, and I had done the Fretboard Fundamentals introductory free course, which is *very* basic; FW goes into much more.
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Thank you both for the feedback. I’m a country guy more than anything. I like to sing and play. My singing outweighs my guitar playing for sure.My goals are just that to sing and play. But not just rhythm guitar which I can pretty much do with basic chords nothing fancy. I want to be able to pick as well. I have been taking lessons for over 2 years now. Just started with Tony hoping this will help me get better. Where do I find the fretboard fundamental?
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It’s in the Skill Courses > Learn the Fretboard > Foundations of Fretboard Navigation. When you get there, FW is to the right of FFN.
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One of my many guitar teaching books is Fret Board Freedom by Troy Nelson. It is set up like our lessons where you play a lick a day but it has 7 days a week lesson and the same lick, same note, are played in different positions on the fret board. It is set up to be 1 lesson a day for a year.
It does help you recognize that there are different positions on fret board that you can find the same notes to play the exact same lick that your started Playing on Monday. It does use the caged system to help explain how you can find all of these positions. It was very interesting and I have revisited the course probably once a year to just brush up on different lick shapes.
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Pete I agree with you as I haven’t seen any daily/weekly lesson involving public domain songs. I think we study a wide variety of popular music from artist’s that I, mostly, have admired. I give Tony credit for evolving the song selections from the sites beginning roots where there may have been more of a bluegrass or country feel to the songs. I actually would be fine with some more of that. I would even tackle a simple classical piece just to change things up.
Another thing to mention is if you play a 1, 4, 5 and relative minor progression you are not required to use the same version of those chords. I use minors, sus, dominant and diminished chord tones all the time just to give progressions some more texture and tones in place of major chord tones all the time. I take our daily lessons and change them every day as anyone who follows my comments knows. We just played the Jimi Chord on Friday. hard to find a better chord progression than that, even if it is a minor dominant 7th with an added flat 11th tone. That definitely isn’t boring. If all I had were potatoes to eat I would be bored but if those potatoes are au grat’n then we are flying high.
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Thank you all for your help
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