The hardest notes to find on the guitar fretboard(www.gitori.com)
26 pointsby udit993 hours ago5 comments
  • scarecrowboban hour ago
    As a person who performs a lot of music on various instruments, playing in "closed" positions where you don't know the not you're playing is a just-fine strategy.

    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.

  • gchamonlivean hour ago
    I could never really bridge the gap between spoken language and execution on a guitar. I approach improvising and playing by intervals and shapes. For me I need to have direct access to the guitar that doesn't pass through language, as if the guitar was my mouth and I'd execute a chord or a melody as if it were a word or a sentence, without thinking about syntax.

    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.

    • ninkendoan hour ago
      > I'd execute a chord or a melody as if it were a word or a sentence, without thinking about syntax

      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.

      • scarecrowbob41 minutes ago
        One of the reasons why I play a whole lot of jazz standards on different instruments is because it builds that feeling of just "knowing" (if I can hear the notes in my head) what I should play. I find "youtube jam tracks" wholly unhelpful, but I spend a whole lot of time playing to backing tracks for stuff like "All of Me" or "Sweet Sue" and playing the melody in different positions/ registers. I have been finding that a lot better for my playing than doing scales (though I still work scales on instruments where I in a learning phase).

        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.

      • an hour ago
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    • james_marks40 minutes ago
      I've been having success playing as you describe, "ear to hand", and then once I have something I like, hand-writing it in tablature so I can lock in the notes.

      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.

    • marssaxmanan hour ago
      I ran into that from the opposite side when I attempted to learn the guitar, coming from a background in classical piano and woodwinds: my whole conceptual architecture for intervals and harmonies was based on a linear arrangement of notes, and I could not get my head around the way a guitar wants you to sort of feel the shapes and positions of chords instead. Odd and disorienting experience.
  • TrackerFF39 minutes ago
    I've played guitar for over 30 years, some of them professionally. I have always struggled, still do, recognizing notes. Once I have some "anchor", no problem. But if someone whistles a random tone, and asks what key it is - I'm of no use. My absolute pitch is garbage, but my relative pitch is excellent.
  • unzadunza2 hours ago
    As a left-handed guitar player, that was really hard. I couldn't get any of them in time.
    • criddellan hour ago
      I'm a right-handed player and missed a bunch and then I quit. I wondered if maybe I somehow set it to an alternate tuning or something? Went back and realized they have the strings listed in the opposite order that I expected (my guitar has the low E on the top and the high E on the bottom).
      • apercu24 minutes ago
        "(my guitar has the low E on the top and the high E on the bottom)."

        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".

    • udit992 hours ago
      hi there...assuming you're talking about the game itself, it has a left handed mode under Settings [Under dropdown you get when you click/tap the profile icon on top right)
  • metalman2 hours ago
    I struggle even knowing what the notes are called, but have a rudimentry knowledge of what some chords are, but not why. All that matters to me is how it sounds, and since I am singing with guitar, improvising as I go , when someone asks what note or chords I am useing , I do struggle for an answer, but it occurs to me , now, to tell them to play whichever ones they like the most, and we will MAKE it work.
    • javier123454321an hour ago
      Learning the notes helped me immensely. Like, one of the lowest effort highest leverage activities. It took a few weeks of deliberate practice and it made a lot of things easier. I just followed this: https://youtu.be/PJddQ6Q0UDo?si=DCCtH5Y6RzHNY5Nn

      Highly recommend it.

    • dava967 minutes ago
      Learn the notes on the E string, then the concept of an octave and how to find them.

      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

    • hannofcartan hour ago
      Am not sure if this is indeed what you are talking about but if it's the realisation that any song can be played in any key, and that you can mechanically 'transpose' (I think of it as shifting) any song in whichever key you want and more fundamentally, a tune is made of intervals, that was a big aha moment for me too.

      The next was discovering the tonal center or 'root' of a song. A lot of gears clicked into place at that point.

    • udit992 hours ago
      That's one way to do it. Honestly, that's the beauty of the guitar. You can just learn a handful of chord shapes and be off to the races. But it also turns into it's biggest weakness when people want to go deeper into learning and understanding the instrument.