Comments

• pickitjohn South Texas Corpus, San Antonio, AustinVirtuoso Patenotte 260

  January 2014 Posts: 936

  Hope this helps
  
  
  
  pick on
  
  pickitjohn

  

  Warning There was an error rendering this rich post.
• Jazzaferri Victoria B.C.Moderator Dunn Ultrafox, DuPont MDC20 Gretsch Chet Atkins CG

  January 2014 Posts: 3,707

  All the modern jazz people I know all read....they have to bea ble to do that in order to make a living....

  The Magic really starts to happen when you can play it with your eyes closed
• Jazzaferri Victoria B.C.Moderator Dunn Ultrafox, DuPont MDC20 Gretsch Chet Atkins CG

  January 2014 Posts: 3,707

  Pickitjohn.....you may have hit upon an idea....make the fretboard with light wood under all the natural notes and have dark wood under the #/b notes.

  

  The Magic really starts to happen when you can play it with your eyes closed
• wim ChicagoModerator Barault #503 replica

  February 2014 Posts: 1,457

  things like this have been tried on electrics ... http://fretlight.com/ ... i feel like it might give people a bad habit of looking at the fingerboard too much though??
• Jazzaferri Victoria B.C.Moderator Dunn Ultrafox, DuPont MDC20 Gretsch Chet Atkins CG

  February 2014 Posts: 3,707

  Spend 15 minutes a day playing with eyes closed...that'll cure that one

  The Magic really starts to happen when you can play it with your eyes closed
• Al Watsky New JerseyVirtuoso

  February 2014 Posts: 440

  I guess we're all in a hurry ?
  We all want to accelerate the process toward mastery.
  Some players will memorize faster than others.
  A player at a certain level will benefit from playing up each string and naming the notes as they go, as has been previously mentioned.
  Many advanced techniques evolve and can be used as skills develop.
  Seems the fact is that the mastery of a musical instrument takes hours a day over years.
  7 years is a time period thats always bandied about.
  15 is more like it for most people.
  Factor in different levels of talent and you can see there is quite a range in the effort required.
  With art its best to remember to enjoy the process.
  You need to like to practice to succeed . You need to want to spend the time.
  If you keep your ears open it will help take the sting out of trying to force your self to remember things .
  Its music, you hear not facts you memorize. Stop trying to memorize and start trying to hear.
  I was asked to do an "introduction to the instruments" course at a local prep school one year. Helping out a friend who has a teaching position . OK fine.
  I go to the school at the appointed time and tune all the fractional guitars and finally about 15 young people none over the age of 10 or 12 come into the room.
  It was then my task to show them how one might go about becoming acquainted with the guitar . How to hold it , strum a simple chord. Play a simple scale.
  One young person picked the instrument up and with about 30 seconds of instruction was able to play a C scale starting with the open low E played through the entire scale across the strings making no mistakes and continued up the high E string to the harmonic at the 12th fret.
  Thats not the usual thing. Most people take a bit more prompting than that.
  I asked this person if they had any family members who played guitar or if there was perhaps a guitar that just happened to be around, any connection to the instrument.
  He told me that he had never held a guitar before that day and that it just seemed natural and logical to him.
  There was no stress or doubt in his approach. Just a natural interaction with a common object.
  That is the exception to the rule.
  The rest of us will most likely need to endeavor to persevere.
  

  
• Jazzaferri Victoria B.C.Moderator Dunn Ultrafox, DuPont MDC20 Gretsch Chet Atkins CG

  February 2014 Posts: 3,707

  some of the things that can reduce the time to mastery are
  
  1. spend a few minutes before you start setting your goal for the practice session (even if it to just relax and noodle ideas)
  
  2. close your eyes and focus inward to get to a state of relaxed concentration.
  
  3. stay in that state of relaxed concetration while playing (Kenny Werner calls it "the space") and if you find yourself getting out of it stop, close your eyes relax focus and start again.
  
  Keep in mind that while there are doubts he was human Charlie Parker didn't start playing til his early teens and within a year of starting was able to play professionally with some pretty fine people. Others have taken decades and never quite get to that spot. You are somewhere in that spectrum and anywhere you are is fine for you. Relax and anjoy the journey as it is the journey that matters not where you end up.

  

  The Magic really starts to happen when you can play it with your eyes closed
• Buco NOVA, DCDeity Ivanovski maple/spruce

  February 2014 Posts: 4,736

  Something a teacher of mine handed out in the class.
  I found it useful and tried to study and absorb the relations among the notes rather than notes themselves. It's something I still work on but this piece of paper helped along the way for sure.
  

  

  Every note wants to go somewhere-Kurt Rosenwinkel