fretwork

i think i’ve already mentioned here that i’m getting back into guitar – pretty sure i’ve mentioned it… anyway, set it up nearby and it’s been what i turn to when i feel distracted and need to focus. noodling on the guitar has felt better than picking up my phone to thumb-scroll into a dissociative fugue. comparing those two things is absurd, i know; but i’ve recognized a marked improvement in well-being since trading phone time for guitar time.

spent the last couple months dusting off the few songs i’ve learned over the years, and learning one new song. i wanted to finally learn and play a song all the way through, and i have! 22 years after picking up a guitar for the first time and i’m actually learning how to play it. wow…

i realize that playing one or two songs doesn’t amount to knowing how to play the guitar, so i’m doing some exercises to learn the natural notes of the fretboard. i can poke around and make stuff up, but i have no idea what i’m doing or any of the notes i’m plucking away at. that’s no good. found a couple helpful videos from Music Theory for Guitar and Redlight Blue that encourage getting to know the fretboard and provide some pointers, and that’s just what i’m setting out to do.

although the internet has endless diagrams mapping out the fretboard, i felt i’d get more from the exercises if i started out making my own (this was also in an effort to keep my wheels from spinning into distraction and overthinking elsewhere). made the fretboard diagram in Illustrator and made each GIF in Photoshop. set the GIF frame durations to 1.5 seconds, an approximation to match the 40 bpm i set my metronome app to for practicing. here are each of the notes on the fretboard isolated out from A to G, moving from the sixth to first strings:

like i wrote earlier, i know this is procrastinating from actually doing the exercises. i just thought making my own diagrams would help connect the dots. i think it has, and will. nevertheless, this was a fun diagrammatic exercise and a good distraction. there are plenty of other things tugging at my attention right now, getting in the way of work and thoughts. so annoying…

time to get back to it – lots to do.

ok, bye bye!