Funny thing..I played saxaphone almost 40 years ago and the way I remember intervals and notes in a scale is by remembering the fingerings on the horn. Now just to get that way with a fretboard!

Another good one Griff. Everything is in the attitude, especially to students. I am a bass player and get your emails Griff because you are a gifted teacher and because your lessons frequently go beyond the guitar. Rock on.

To Anthony Ingoglia, if you check out other music theory sources you will find that it is because the notes are approximations to something like the sounds, that they have made the intervals or distances they do. Other theory sources talk of 100 points in the octave and dividing them roughly equally so they sound right. Fascinating aint it?

Cheers Griff
I got the first two questions wrong but all the rest right . And I can pick a string and go up the fretboard and back and name all the notes.

Griff,

I got a perfect score but almost feel like I was cheating. I am a better keyboard player than I am a guitarist and I can read music. I had no problem visualizing a keyboard while doing the quiz. In fact, I could not STOP from visualizing a keyboard. I need a different way to learn the notes on a guitar. I know most of them, but some I am still counting up or down. That was fun but I need a different method to do the same while visualizing a guitar. Thanks for all your work and taking so much interest in your students. You’re the best teacher by far!

Thanks,
Louis Ogden

Thanks as always Griff. Since the previous comments covered visualizing the keyboard, shouldn’t we be visualizing the fret board and counting frets instead of half steps? There are apps that make a game out of naming the notes by placing a dot on the fret board and you have to name the note from four choices. The game is to beat your own score within a time frame.
The time isn’t as important as the number of correct answers. Knowing where Griff’s quiz question starts and seeing where you have to go gives the visual of “how many frets apart, or how many half steps.” If this helps anyone, great, if not I hope I didn’t make it more confusing. Nice “talking” to you.

I’ve been playing for a few years but I just can’t get the hang of it I’m wanting to play I have a electric and acoustic guitars so I’m very interested in learning more please and thanks

Can you show this on the neck of the guitar, that would help me!

Griff, I luv music theory; learned some playing uke and moved on to the piano and guitar. The theory is the same for all of these, of course, so i saved a lot time and am getting up to speed in the process. Keep it coming and thanks

Thanks, Griff!

A few thoughts:

1. Thinking of an octave of 12 equal-spaced notes rather than 8 unequal ones makes the math and movement on the frets easier. In such a system, instead of a 1,3,5 as indicating a major chord, it would be 1,5,8, or if minor, 1,4,8. If a 7th is involved, it would be a 1,5,8,11 for a major 7th (so-called in our current system), and a 1,5,8,10 for a dominate “7th”. I like your counting in “half-steps” because they’re equal-spaced. Easier for spacial awareness on fretboards.

(As an aside, I sometimes wish I could imagine the chord laid out on a circle with 12 equal slots available, the 0 and the 13th being the same place, only a layer above if the circle were seen as a spiral. There’d be a easily seen geometry that would lend itself to harmonic resonance or dissonance, a spacial-pictorial way of seeing how notes or chords relate.)

2. A fun way to acquaint our ears to various modes is to start (or drone) on some notes as home base while making the others relate to it. For instance, in the key of C droning on C as the tonic and playing all the other white keys on a piano puts you in Ionian mode, the familiar “Do, Re, Me, Fa, So” scale that most of our music uses. But drone on the A of that same set of notes puts us in the Aeolian mode, the so-called relative minor of C. But it gets better. Drone on the D and play the Dorian mode. G gets us to the Mixolydian, our favorite blues scale. E is interesting. F is jazzy. B is strange but fun. Using the piano makes this easy to see and hear, but the same set of chordal relationships and scales apply to any other key than C.

3. One thought about enharmonic notes. We wouldn’t want to think of going from Eb to E, for that is the same letter. We’d instead think of it as going from D# to E, for then the A-G (or G-A) letters are still in place in a scale. I also think of going from, say E to Eb when I want to flat the E (as in bending a C major chord to a C minor one). But in terms of learning music, I’ve noticed there are two realms other than all white keys on the piano, the flat realm and the sharp realm. If I wonder how to read a note or call a note I don’t mix flats and sharps. Picky, but perhaps useful in mental understanding.

4. All the modes and scales discussed so-far have to adjacent 2nds in them. In C Ionian, they’re the EF and the BC. In A Aeolian they’d be BC and EF again, but in another place. All other steps would be so-called whole steps, what you’ve presented here as two half-steps. Knowing where the adjacent seconds are helps orient all other notes, for they’d be whole steps, not half.

(But even more interesting and fun to play is the Hungarian or Harmonic Minor. Take A Aeolian (the relative minor of C major) and instead of using the dominate 7th (the G), skip it and play it as the G#. This creates three adjacent seconds in the scale and an unusual big gap (a step and a half) between the 6 and the sharpened 7th (now adjacent to the tonic A). Sounds complicated, but it’s easy to see and use. Drone in A, play all the white keys, but avoid the G and play it as a G#. It’s a very fun, dancy, squirmy sort of mode.)

Anyway, you asked what we thought, and these are some thoughts your initial explanation of the scales with various steps within them popped up for me. They’ve been on my mind. Distancing myself at home and glad for your occasional lessons. Thanks for asking.

im a litte slow on the draw so i will put more time in im comfortable wiyh it

Thank you I’ve learned so much.amd want more.thank you.im just starting out.

It didn’t work for me, like reading codes. But I long ago learned off Griff’s Boxes of E minor pentatonic and, as I jammed solo to CDs, began to anticipate note and semi-note choices by ear, converting Box one into Box 1,2,3,4,5; relying on my ear to tell me which will work for a particular song. This also gives me the flexibility to reverse the note pattern as I traverse the frets, as in E to A to C, etc.

As some very good songwriters make unconventional choices, my ear anticipates these as the natural way to go, and it seems to me that these are the note progresions that make songs immortal.

I am guessing I am making no sense to most of you LOL.

Does the minor pentatonic have a scale..? &, does the minor scale come from the major scale..???? Thank you

Great exercise

Made a couple of mistakes with 14 & 16 but the got the rest right, it’s pretty clear in my head now.
Thanks

This memory tool is great, and for me it was very beneficial when I chose to sort the various ways this can be seen when applied to a fretboard diagram. Most of the18 questions can be visualized from the low “E” string (as well as the 3rd,4th & 5th strings). For me I prefer to see the patterns and so I usually print a a copy and then edit it to my personal needs and some times color code the actual notes which I then compare the various diagrams. (The circle of 5th’s come to mind.) I’ve created several diagrams prior to this and paste them on a wall or add them into a 3 ring binder.

But brain memory and muscle coordination combined will but you on the stage! Thanks.

Thank you