Beginner Theory: Learning the Fretboard Exercise I

I have been reading Desi Serna's Fretboard Theory book. The very first thing he asks you to do in the first chapter is to learn the natural notes on the 6th and 5th strings.They look something like this:

E String:

  • EF-G-A-BC-D-E -> up the neck
  • E-D-CB-A-G-FE  <- down the neck

A String:

  • A-BC-D-EF-G-A  -> up the neck
  • A-G-FE-D-CB-A  <- down the neck

Note: Notes separated by a dash are whole step notes.

The book moves on from there using these natural notes to teach the CAGED system. But you need to have the fundamental down first.

To try to get these notes under my fingers and recall them at will, I have been practicing playing each note and saying the name out loud going up and down the neck. This has been working to a degree and I am sure that I will get there eventually.

Yesterday I discovered a fun exercise to add using Rocksmith+ and wanted to share it.

Recently, a new list of songs was released with "Simple" charts called Easy single-note songs. I was dorking around with the song The Story by Brandi Carlile and realized I was playing pretty much only on the 6th and 5th strings.

So, I started calling out the notes as I played them as an exercise. I was tripped up a couple times remembering what a specific note was, so I turned on Riff Repeater for the whole song and enabled Note by Note. This gave me some time to figure out what the note was before I played it.

So the exercise became say the note name and play it in time so Note by Note did not stop the song. Then attempt to do the same just playing along with the song at speed until I could 100% it.

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