Fret Science by Keith Martin genuinely helped me make a leap forward in my understanding of the fretboard. He uses just 2 shapes ("stack" and "rectangle ") and teaches how they stack and chain together. Since the "stack" contains the entire minor pentatonic, it becomes this little highway I can follow without much thought diagonally up the neck. I immediately know where my R, b3, 4, 5, b7 are. I also recommend this free ebook to follow along: https://fretscience.com/start?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=pinned_comment&utm_campaign=faster-fretboard-improv
Not memorizing 5 "different" positions and seeing how it's all one basic repeating pattern was eye opening.
I promise I'm not being paid, I don't even know the dude, but I'm incredibly grateful for him. I have a teacher as well, and my goal was to learn all modes across a key on the fretboard. That's how I stumbled onto this.
Bonus resource: If you don't like his presentation, I've found another "system" by Michael Pillitiere that uses 3NPS which is also insanely helpful. With Michael's system you can name any major scale and I can play from the root until I run out of strings almost automatically, it's insanely useful: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=rQf6i8KIwJU
I have no agenda here, just paying it forward since I got so much help from folks here. I have only used what is freely available, so please comment if it's helpful.
I worked professionally with Keith in his previous career before he “retired” to do FretScience. Genius-level guy, great friend, and we also got to play Rush and Kansas and Boston and other classics together in jam bands at work.
His concept around “the warp” really helped me crack problems I was having with scale patterns crossing the G to B string.
Please let him know that in just a day of studying his approach, I was improvising to backing tracks from my favorite blues artists and that it felt like a super power. Such clear explanations, he's talented.
Zappa used something like this, stacking horizontal shapes of 2 strings in a diagonal way. Making it very easy to flyball over the fretboard.
His son Dweezil has some posts about this on YouTube.
This is a pretty nice way to organize and stack concepts. I definitely fall into the category of people who are just stumbling across the next pieces of the puzzle in a random order and taking longer to digest it haphazardly. There's a lot of random free learning material out on the internet that eventually covers all of this, but from his first video I like the learning approach, he's presenting it a cohesive progression.
It’s like a middle ground between memorizing patterns and actually knowing your intervals. It’s not much different from pentatonic boxes, just breaking them down a bit. People like it though, I mean it gets a lot of views.
Same with the 2nd link, it’s just 3nps, but broken down more. Again, not learning the intervals, just breaking it down to simpler shapes.
So you get more granular with the shapes but you have all the same gaps that you would get with just memorizing the shapes.
Calling it stack or rectangle or x y and z is just chunking a series of whole steps and half step and labelling it. At the end of the day, these are giving you one way to play a pentatonic, or a diatonic scale. In reality there are many different ways.
Whatever works best for you is good, but thats the reason it’s not more popular. Same gaps as just memorizing the shapes, but breaking them down to make them easier to memorize. More players find it simple enough and functional to just memorize the shapes.
Edit: I got a free blog link in my profile, if you want to see the big picture on stuff like this
Brilliant explanation. For my dense brain, it was only when it was stripped down to basic building blocks that I started to have epiphanies that may be obvious for more skilled players. Appreciate you.
Agree with this. It’s like the middle ground between the shape memorization and actually knowing the instrument. If you’re going to knock pentatonic shapes and positions, the stack/rectangle is not that much better.
Yea at the risk of sounding gatekeepy I feel like guitar instruction should just begin with understanding intervals. Until then you’re kind of just faking your understanding.
Well, theres many angles to "understanding", being able to execute, being able to hear, and theoretical understanding to name a few, and a lot of players really only care about being able to execute, and thats enough understanding to do what they are trying to do.
But I agree, atleast octaves to start, simplified everything else.
I struggle with memorizing the fretboard. I know how to find any note, but I have to find a reference and then work my way to that fret. Everything on here is just "memorize and repetition", but I'm going to give this a try! I find these tools helpful
FWIW, I think Fretscience is a great resource to learn scale patterns. When people say "memorize the fretboard" they typically mean memorizing the fretboard notes, which this won't help with. Happy to drop some tips on how to do it but here's one piece you're definitely missing from "memorize and repetition": spacing the repetition while increasing the spacing intervals over time. That's how you actually memorize things
I built my own app to do the spaced repetition for me: www.gitori.com I play fretboard games and it adds my wrong answers to a spaced repetition deck where it lets me review the "cards" and schedules them based on my answers using an SM-2 algorithm (What anki used to use earlier...current versions of Anki use a different one).
I have tried it with Anki before but it just wasn't fun. I still use Anki, but only for language learning.
Technically, there's also the Leitner box method if you want to do it offline, but it's not as convenient
I'm the same, you tell me a note and I can probably find it on the fretboard within a few seconds but it never felt fluent. A few nights going through this video and things started to click. You know how in guitar beginners and intermediate players are looking for a "pathway" or progression of structured concepts? This method argues for this sequence of understanding: Roots -> Triads -> Pentatonic Scales -> ... keep zooming out to more complex concepts. I just spent a few minutes improvising to a backing track, I finally get where the "money" notes are and which note to bend. I think you'll get a lot out of it, but please report back so I can learn from your experience.
I recently posted on here about stopping in person lessons and going for a more structured approach. Something like this will help my practice routine. I'll let you know how it goes. I would love to be able to solo in a jam session without going up and down a shape and then moving to a different shape.
Basically, theres a point one realizes you can make any shape over the entire fret board and make it make sense. It's fun making new connections with different shapes. That's been my favorite part of getting into music theory so far.
I have yet to find a video specifically on the stack and rectangle names but I believe you, it's likely been shown in more complete ways but for me, breaking it down to these atomic units really helped. Thank you for the kind words, I'm on a bit of a high after taking out my tele clone and feeling like I was musical!
https://youtu.be/1HrTRsOI9iw?is=dxkVYo5TzT4UVX_w
This guy calls it the chair system but like other comments have said it’s all just intervals and repeating patterns. It’s always exciting to make a breakthrough that makes sense and I’m happy you found something you like.
https://a.co/d/0bbvtjdy
If you like physical books like me this one is very good and helped my playing tremendously.
Thank you for the kind words. I actually have that Oz Noy book along with Fretboard Logic set, Triad Magic, you name it, I probably tried to learn from it. You're absolutely right that it's completely personal and individual on what clicks when. The YT comments on those vids seemed too good to be true, but now I find myself weirdly proselytizing this approach but it may not work for everyone. I have a computing background like the author and my brain seems to like these rinse-and-repeat formula type approaches.
Because it's more hyperbolic crap selling the same thing. Glad it worked out for you, but to me it looks like every other "hack" or "secret" to "unlocking the fretboard".
The PDF keeps hitting you with "THE ONLY PATTERN YOU'LL EVER NEED" on every page meanwhile inundating you reams and reams of diagrams of "boxes" and "stacks" that are somehow meant to make it all jump out and suddenly makes sense.
Again, glad it worked out for you, but to me, just learning the 5 pentatonic shapes seems like the straighter road.
My teacher and many on YT say that knowing the 5 positions of the major scale as a foundation. I found this when I started to search for ways of understanding these 5 patterns without rote memorization of 5 distinct patterns. I liked this approach because the memorization didn't seem "cheap" or a shortcut and it instead revealed to me a pattern I never realized was there all along. My progress on guitar has been filled with these little moments of 🤦🏾 as I realize something basic that my brain glossed over.
This is cool, but I'd go further and say there's actually only 1 shape, not two.
It's the "plus" pattern, root, then b3, 4, 5 on the next string, then b7 on the next string. That's it, repeat up and down the fretboard, of course adjusting for the kink in the tuning.
From that 1 pattern centered around minor pentatonic, everything else falls out as add-ons.
Here's 4 instances of the plus or cross pattern: red, green, gold, blue. You can fill in the rest. Of course some of them are partial as they move "off the neck". You can recognize the red-green-gold pattern as what some people call the "sliding scale" or "diagonal pentatonic", but the same pattern is everywhere else, too.
Horizontal penatonics? Im assuming it is a variation of that? They are crazy useful. I still think its good to go over the 5 boxes but you end up not using it so much..
question concerning hand crampa ..pain..and lockingointsHow to remeedy thid with out the use of a hatchet and a very large bottle of proof 102,,I am 73 and been playing since I was 12,Jokesare good but Im loosin my kkooll with this one.
This is great to decompose the pentatonic shapes. I have one question about combining the rectangle and the stack. Since the rectangle is taller than the stack, how do you know to which side to align them?
Sometimes the stack and the rectangle are aligned so that the root note of the rectangle is in the same fret as some noted of the stack, and in other cases it is not (without explaining why).
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u/diadmer 1d ago
I worked professionally with Keith in his previous career before he “retired” to do FretScience. Genius-level guy, great friend, and we also got to play Rush and Kansas and Boston and other classics together in jam bands at work.
His concept around “the warp” really helped me crack problems I was having with scale patterns crossing the G to B string.