Watch as Gabriel Bergman outlines five essential topics you need to level up your playing.
How Do I Learn All the Notes on the Fretboard?
The guitar fretboard can be a very tricky instrument to memorize, but understanding how to visualize the notes on the neck is absolutely essential no matter what style you play. Start by learning your octave shapes and then moving them all over the neck while saying the name of the note out loud. Pretty soon, your eyes, ears, and fingers will start to connect and you'll understand the fretboard on a deeper level.
How Do I Learn the CAGED System?
The CAGED system is simply a series of shapes based on the open-position chords we are learn when we are starting out. These shapes can help you not only understand chords, but also scales, arpeggios, and pentatonics. Start with our in-depth CAGED lesson and really develop seeing these shapes all over the neck.
How Do I Learn Triads on the Guitar?
Having a deep understanding of triads all over the neck is the foundation for a well-rounded view of the fretboard. Start simple with a few shapes on the top three strings and then move those through a few keys. Once that feels good start slowly moving those shapes to other string sets. Not all of them will be comfortable or useful in all situations, but soon you will develop a vocabulary of shapes.
How Do I Learn Arpeggios on the Guitar?
What's an arpeggio? It's when you play the notes of a chord one at a time. Arpeggios can take many forms, so don't try to tackle them all at once. Start with triads on adjacent strings and then slowly expand to 7th chords.
How Do I Learn Pentatonics?
Pentatonics are the bread-and-butter of blues-rock guitar. The shapes are easy to get under your fingers and learning some stock pentatonic licks is relatively easy. One tip: Learn the scales horizontally up the neck in addition to the vertical positions. It will make shifting patterns much easier.
