As a person who performs a lot of music on various instruments, playing in "closed" positions where you don't know the note you're playing is a just-fine strategy.
There are reasons why folks know the names of notes in some positions better than others.
When I was playing a lot of bass for folks in low rent with bands that were playing standard music and never rehearsing, I generally only paid attention to the low string and worked my parts out (often on the fly) around the relative pitches.
If you're trying to keep up with the bass part on a song you've never heard before while performing it on stage, it's much more relevant (and far easier/faster) to know the position of the minor 3 note of the scale than it is to know what note is the minor 3.
Over the decades I play a lot more piano, and that changes. I play a lot of blues and jazz but am quite poor at reading typical rep for the instrument. While I started out mostly playing using chord fingerings (and inversions), the more I play the more specific I can get on my understanding of actual notes. Because I've been playing a lot of clarinet (which forces me to transpose a whole lot, including reading a part and transposing on the fly), the names of specific notes has gotten a whole lot more important, but also easier with practice.
On the pedal steel (which I have only been playing for a decade on and am still coming to terms with), while I can pull all that knowledge I am still usually playing based on a notes position- I know what string/lever combo is going to get the 6 note in a given scale rather than thinking "I need to play an A to get this C chord to be a C6, and that's this position on the neck with the BC pedals down or that position with the LKR lever pushed.
All that is to say, it's okay to not know the names of notes if you understand their function related to the melody.
Playing guitar, at least for me, is all geometry. The fifth is the next string two frets up (like the knight in chess, I just realized) and so on. Each chord is a shape - so if your starting with a note, you kind of know where to go after a while.
I've played guitar for over 30 years now, and it is 100% geometry to me, or Tetris pieces. A D chord is a triangle, A chord is a line, a minor barre chord with a root on the 2nd string is stair steps, etc.
One of the things that is bittersweet about learning a song is that it can take the magic out of the song; instead of just hearing it, I am thinking in chord shapes, positions, lead lines, etc.
I can't even Phish because if I'm on drugs I fall into listening-like-I-need-to-play-the-next-chord. Whereas a lot of songwriter music I can listen-like-I'm-reading-underegrad-poetry
I do feel that way about tetris, too. I think the reason I enjoy older jazz standards on bass is playing them is a little like solving a suduko- I can get a satisfying answer without much more than the melody. That doesn't work for modern rock where the riff is key. That kind of "well, it sounds okay but it doesn't line up with my idea of what makes sense" is my own anti-magical-feeling.
Guitar music in particular has very little actual pressure on learning any music notation or theory. Some of the greatest guitar soloists of all time could not read sheet music and knew zero music theory. This is common enough where there's good odds if you just name a great guitarist, they are probably in this camp.
This is debatable because I dont know what you mean when you say they didnt know theory. Hendrix is a great example, supposedly he didnt know, but it is very clear he would play the pentatonic of the quality of chord he was playing over. Is that knowing theory? Or playing is playing the BB King box theory? Or is knowing the major scale theory? It's almost certain that the best guitarists that you're saying knew some of these things. So do you mean the nomenclature?
Like, I know what a secondary dominant is because I've had to use it in blues turn arounds- I didn't know that's what some folks would call it, but I knew that in the key of G, I'd often play an A instead of the Am.
And I think that the vocabulary should describe what folks do rather than the doings being driven by the vocabulary.
Most guitar players (and improv folks) that I know have much more theory that the folks who are reading but who generally don't think about what the function of their line is in a larger song.
If you're playing by memory and ear, you have to have some concepts because you can't just read a part.
I've seen it and I kind of get it. I have worked with folks who do things for theoretical reasons instead of describing what they do with these ideas.
At the same time, I wish more folks would learn to read music, or even be literate enough to read lead sheets- my life would be so much easier if folks could just show up and play the thing without spending hours learning from recordings and making whatever kind of esoteric notations they've made up.
In Miles Davis' autobiography, Davis talked about how they jammed a few times. Davis would tell him to play a particular chord or scale, and Hendrix had no idea what it was at first, e.g. "try an E minor diminished yada yada there... a mixolydian scale would work on top of these changes..."
Once Davis taught him the concepts he got them immediately, or it might be a chord he knew and played, but didn't know the formal name of. So, he was a brilliant intuitive musician, but didn't have the theory chops of someone who attended Juliard like Davis.
That is what we mean by Hendrix didn't know the theory.
Yeah he didn't know the names of the concepts that he already knew. My intuition says music theory is the understanding of the concepts, not the formal study of the names. Like a person that can only play the major scale because they studied the theory, in my mind they have less mastery of theory than a person that can compose "Little Wing" or "Lenny" without ever studying it.
To me, the theory is as much a communication tool as a knowledge. It is a common language for musicians to communicate musical ideas, at a higher level than musical notation. E.g. I can go to a jazz open mic, someone says the progression is "ii V I in Dminor", or a blues jam and its "I IV V, A major", or a Grateful Dead-type jam and its all mixolydian in B, and everyone is on the same page out of the gate. The theory is you know all of the scale modes, AND what they are called, AND can tell another musician what you're doing and why. Tons of people can play interesting things outside of the box, without know why or how it's defined.
I can get behind this definition. But even following that definition, people without theory knowledge who know how to play would know a third of theory if you split the three categories that you said equally. I venture to say that the concepts themselves weigh more than an even third though.
Right, you can be an incredibly articulate speaker without necessarily knowing the grammatical terms for the different parts of speech in each sentence.
I think there's a number of people who learned to play by ear who just sort of "internalized" theory without needing a formal curriculum.
They have taste for sure and an ear for a blues lick, but they don't know formal theory. It's like how my cat understands gravity but has no awareness of formal gravitational theory or the maths involved.
The cat is a bad analogy. A better one for me would be like a mathematician that does a contribution to the field without formal education. Would you say they don't know any mathematics if they invented their own nomenclature?
Well it isn't like they are inventing their own nomenclature either. Where are Jimi's scale books he wrote in his own modes? He didn't operate in those terms. He was very much like my cat, having an insinct for a formalized theory he does not know the formalized language for.
Is it understanding formal music theory? No, only if you stretch the definition of formal music theory to include what is definitely not formal music theory by any one's definition.
Look at the tablature for little wing and you will see that he most definitely did some sort of theorizing, as he was very structured and systematic.
My point is that what he did is what music theory describes, and he definitely arrived there. He most definitely could play the scales and the modes, even if he never used the word dorian.
There is just some allergic reaction to the word that people take to mean something along the lines of demeriting the artistry. Had he learned the diatonic chords would that mean he is no longer a no theory guy, and would that make him worse?
I know thats not what you are saying, but i do see that from the hardcore 'theory is bad' proponents. Is theory the names of the relationship between tones, or the relationships themselves?
He had a music theory I'm sure, but the overlap of that with what's currently being taught in conservatories (let alone what was taught in his time), I'm less sure about.
I'm not really tracking where your confusion is. You can very much so do or "discover" something in practice that a theory describes without knowing that theory. I'd say it's even very common to "know" certain notes/chords/whatnot sound good with others and not learn "why" until later on, if ever.
My confusion is: why would you say that they don't know theory if they know the thing that the theory describes? If a person builds a radio by themselves, would you say that they don't know engineering because they didn't get a formal education on it? If a person figures out how to make a derivative, would you say they don't know mathematics because they didn't study it formally?
Anyone? I have a hard time finding the beat. If you ask me to count some 4/4 song, there's only about a 25% chance I get the one correct...
I'm a very beginner guitar player (and have been for about 30 years now) and I know a couple of simple songs. If I try to play along with a record, I'm fine until vocals kick in and then I instantly lose track of the beat and find myself strumming to the syllables of whatever the vocalist is singing.
I agree. But the theory is a way of structuring a system of names and shorthands to help codify what you know about producing music. At what point does your system for structuring the understanding you have about how to organize pitches in a way that you like become theory? Specially if it matches one for one to established concepts in academic music theory?
On some level, yes, knowing what shape an G chord is on a guitar is knowing some theory in the exact same way that being able to get hello world functioning in a language is necessary to starting to understand the broader elements of computer science.
Just because something is the Nth lowest first step does not mean it's not a step.
The argument was that the greatest guitarists didn't know theory so it doesn't equate to that. Hello world equivalent. It's more like building TempleOS or Rollercoaster Tycoon or building SQLite without getting a formal education somehow means you don't understand computer science
It's just really all about the ear and there's plenty of fabulous guitar players who will tell you to transcribe Charlie Parker but tell you don't bother playing scales for hours a day
the only thing id clarify is that a lot of them won’t _formally_ know music theory, but their playing demonstrates can demonstrate a deep understanding of it.
Music notation on a 5-line staff is just another in the category of "shapes," along with pentatonic scales on a fretboard. Theory is another matter though.
Honestly, I know a ton of folks sitting 5th chair violin in a community orchestry or playing 3rd trumpet in a big band who have no idea what note in the chord they are playing and just reading and repeating the line.
Most of the musicians I know have very minimal theory, ironically even less than folks who can't read.
I could never really bridge the gap between spoken language and execution on a guitar. I approach improvising and playing by intervals and shapes. For me I need to have direct access to the guitar that doesn't pass through language, as if the guitar was my mouth and I'd execute a chord or a melody as if it were a word or a sentence, without thinking about syntax.
This makes it hard to compose and study music, since I take a long time to transpose and navigate the harmonic field, but it's a tradeoff that I need to do, my brain doesn't work otherwise.
> I'd execute a chord or a melody as if it were a word or a sentence, without thinking about syntax
This is exactly the same for me. The guitar fretboard is essentially synesthesia for me when I hear music. I hear a melody and part of my brain feels the shape of the fingerings as I go. It’s been like this for maybe 30 years or so (I started guitar at a really young age.)
I have no idea if this is common for guitar players though (I assume so? If you’re the sort of player that can play solos, you probably already “audiate” sounds via fingering) but it means I can basically always immediately play a song after hearing it once, even if it’s just the basic melody. I also have what I’d call “weak” perfect pitch (I can easily conjure an E in my head and then figure out from there what note I’m hearing via well-trained relative pitch) so often I can get the exact notes right the first time.
One of the reasons why I play a whole lot of jazz standards on different instruments is because it builds that feeling of just "knowing" (if I can hear the notes in my head) what I should play. I find "youtube jam tracks" wholly unhelpful, but I spend a whole lot of time playing to backing tracks for stuff like "All of Me" or "Sweet Sue" and playing the melody in different positions/ registers. I have been finding that a lot better for my playing than doing scales (though I still work scales on instruments where I in a learning phase).
But that feeling of "just knowing" is common among a lot of instruments and players.
I know that if I play some fingering on the clarinet, or jut grab a chord on the pedal steel, or whatever it's going to do what I intend without thinking about naming what I intend to do, just like i don't think about spelling, punctation, or letter position when I type (even though I often need to edit LOL).
So I agree- if I am playing bass with folks I will often just start playing without thinking too much about what notes I am playing beyond trying to decide on the general tonic key of the song.
I've been having success playing as you describe, "ear to hand", and then once I have something I like, hand-writing it in tablature so I can lock in the notes.
Before this, I was _mostly_ remembering the "safe" notes, but the occasional stumbles break the flow badly, and the tabs have helped. Surprisingly, since I started doing this, its helped me memorize the scale and make fewer mistakes, generally.
I ran into that from the opposite side when I attempted to learn the guitar, coming from a background in classical piano and woodwinds: my whole conceptual architecture for intervals and harmonies was based on a linear arrangement of notes, and I could not get my head around the way a guitar wants you to sort of feel the shapes and positions of chords instead. Odd and disorienting experience.
I don't think it's realistic to draw conclusions between your skill at this game and the skill at finding a real note on a real guitar. I've been playing guitar for 35 years now and note finding is almost subconscious and relies on muscle memory. This is an inverted image from what you'd see anyway. I think all you can determine from this is that some people are good at a video game versions of the memory game.
If you practice this thinking it's going to translate to guitar, your wasting time that would be better spent playing guitar.
Having played this game hundreds (if not thousands) of times, I can assure you that it does make a difference. It's like saying "memorizing a map won't help you navigate the streets because the map looks nothing like the streets".
I recommend you give it a shot and see if it helps you. There's also a couple settings to "invert" the fretboard to your preferences if that's what you prefer.
Lastly, it's really fun to actually play the game with a real guitar. If you click/tap the note on top, it requests mic permissions and you're all set to now play with a real fretboard.
P.S. If you go down the real guitar route, try the Arcade Mode on find the Notes. It's the most fun thing I've ever built...a space invaders style game on the fretboard. But driven with a real guitar.
I was just looking for information about that. I might look later on; I am at that point with my playing where I need to start to add theory to what I have learned in technique by ear. Thanks for your reply :-)
of course, anytime. Also, I have a dedicated theory course along the same lines as well (interactive lessons + games to learn + SRS to memorize).
https://www.gitori.com/themes/music-theory
I've only played partially for about a few years and I can find most of the notes with my eyes closed. Then you have people like Steve Vai who are the in the guitar equivalence of magnus carlsen playing blindfold chess with 20+ people at once. Some people just like to yap to write something cool and get a few upvotes I guess.
The legend goes that Steve Vai showed up with a beat up guitar at Joe Satriani's place to get lessons from him . Satriani told him to come back after a week with all the notes memorized or he won't accept him as a student. Steve did as he was told and the rest is history.
So yeah, some of us are Steve Vais and others like me take months to learn it. To each their own.
I'm a jazz bassist, and I'm not surprised. There are notes that you typically play in certain positions, only because your hand was already in that position for another note. And even as a fluent sight-reader, I make my way around the fingerboard by a combination of note names, anticipation of familiar patterns and dumb luck. Plus, if I see a note on the page, I can often play it before I can name it, because those are different mental circuits.
This is fun. I have always said that a portion of my brain is dedicated to the fretboard. If I'm talking about intervals without an instrument in front of me I am always imagining the fretboard to find, say, a minor 6th from C#. I know the shapes of octaves across different strings very well, so even in the red zones I can find the notes pretty quickly. I cannot say the same for many of my bandmates, as talented as they are.
I completely understand you wanting that. My concern is that I offer a 1 week free trial for all new accounts. There's nothing stopping people from making a new account every week with 10minutemail to use the app for free. Happy to make a "backdoor" email only account for paid users though.
I struggle even knowing what the notes are called, but have a rudimentry knowledge of what some chords are, but not why.
All that matters to me is how it sounds, and since I am singing with guitar, improvising as I go , when someone asks what note or chords I am useing , I do struggle for an answer, but it occurs to me , now, to tell them to play whichever ones they like the most, and we will MAKE it work.
Learning the notes helped me immensely. Like, one of the lowest effort highest leverage activities. It took a few weeks of deliberate practice and it made a lot of things easier. I just followed this: https://youtu.be/PJddQ6Q0UDo?si=DCCtH5Y6RzHNY5Nn
Am not sure if this is indeed what you are talking about but if it's the realisation that any song can be played in any key, and that you can mechanically 'transpose' (I think of it as shifting) any song in whichever key you want and more fundamentally, a tune is made of intervals, that was a big aha moment for me too.
The next was discovering the tonal center or 'root' of a song. A lot of gears clicked into place at that point.
That's one way to do it. Honestly, that's the beauty of the guitar. You can just learn a handful of chord shapes and be off to the races. But it also turns into it's biggest weakness when people want to go deeper into learning and understanding the instrument.
take a look at this interactive course I made: https://www.gitori.com/learn/FBG-101
Once you finish that, you can start playing the accompanying games to practice what you learnt
The funny thing is that as a lap steel player, the middle to upper middle of the neck (5 through to 9) is where you live, because it interacts most usefully with the open strings in most tunings. Same is true of bottleneck slide to some extent.
I could have guessed. The tone and timbre of the middle strings - especially around the middle of the fretboard - are harder to tell the difference between a note on one string or its neighbor in a different position.
I'm surprised it's not all octave pairs, actually. Maybe if he used a lower threshold it'd emerge more as a pattern.
I'm a right-handed player and missed a bunch and then I quit. I wondered if maybe I somehow set it to an alternate tuning or something? Went back and realized they have the strings listed in the opposite order that I expected (my guitar has the low E on the top and the high E on the bottom).
"(my guitar has the low E on the top and the high E on the bottom)."
I wonder if it's because tab usually has "low" strings on the bottom, like in sheet music (lower pitches are at the bottom) and when we (guitarists) are playing chords with melody notes in them (bluegrass, jazz), we talk about the melody notes being on "top".
When I look at someone else holding a guitar, then the low E is on the top and the high E is on the bottom. But when I hold it, turn it 90° and look down at it, then the low E is on the bottom and the high E is on the top.
hi there...assuming you're talking about the game itself, it has a left handed mode under Settings [Under dropdown you get when you click/tap the profile icon on top right)
I wonder if the contrast isn't high enough for some users. Honestly, this is the first time I've gotten this feedback. Maybe try the dark fretboard option? It looks like this:
I've played guitar for over 30 years, some of them professionally. I have always struggled, still do, recognizing notes. Once I have some "anchor", no problem. But if someone whistles a random tone, and asks what key it is - I'm of no use. My absolute pitch is garbage, but my relative pitch is excellent.
if it helps...absolute pitch is _mostly_ a natural innate ability and cannot be trained.("Mostly" because recent studies have shown that you can train kids at an early age.) So you don't need to worry about not having absolute pitch, like you shouldnt worry about not having mensa level iq. What's more important though, is relative pitch, which most people can train for and is really valuable as a musician.
I was in some music classes early on (piano and guitar) and in band from middle school through the end of high school.
If I have perfect/absolute pitch (very doubtful), it's from having certain pitches absolutely burned into my brain. B-flat and F on brass instruments, C on piano, E on guitar, etc.
I can generally memorize and sing back the exact pitches of any song once I've heard it a few times. If I like the song enough, that pitch memory is forever. I will never sing it in the wrong key ever again and that's actually how I get around in music. I can always play back the original song in my head like a tape recording. I learned the names of some chords a long time ago from my favorite songs and now just know them by heart when I hear them (add9, sus4, minor 7th, etc).
Unfortunately, I cannot do this in reverse and name the notes or do any supernatural tricks like Rick Beato's kid. I would have to hum every individual note for a little while and run through the chromatic scale in my mind to tell you the name.
I think to a large extent, it can be trained. I didn't get started until I was like 8 years old and wasn't always the best student either. I hesitate to call this relative pitch because I don't need to hear an outside reference and I can very easily tell when an instrument is out of tune. I'm somewhere in between, and so are most band kids.
I've been struggling to memorize the entire guitar fretboard for several decades, and I blame the Germans! :-)
Context:
* in USA & Canada, notes are a-b-c-d-e-f-g
* Where I'm born though, due to Germanic tradition and influence, b is called h. b-flat is b.
* Given that most teachers start you with C major, it was taught as c-d-e-f-g-a-h
* And of course, where I'm born, you're first taught solfago (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si/ti-do)
So my brain never really learned to think of musical notes as "alphabet". My natural inclination is solfago, and when I use the single letters, my brain interprets them as random string of letters that you have to think about every time (given that for whatever reason "H" is between "A" and "C"), rather than just alphabet. It's like I have two parallel sets of neural pathways: Alphabet - no problem, I can do it forward and backward reflexively, vs Musical Notes - stop all trains, engage upper brain functions, this is the difficult one with no sense or reason.
Very cool. I just started using AI to do something far simpler. I will definitely check out your site.
I had restarted guitar after a 45 yr absence of playing. Took lessons for 9 months and progressed well, but hit a wall. I was going to look toward AI for help getting over the wall what you did looks promising. Thanks!
Site is annoying. Why does the window ratio need to be so widescreen? Why does the quiz run while the "tilt your phone" warning is up? Why is the highlighted area not clear? Why is there such a long delay? between hitting start and the game starting?
1. Fixed the timer when the tilt your phone is up.
2. Marginally increased the contrast for the highlighted area.
3. I can't recreate the delay between hitting start and the game starting. Can you help me reproduce it?
4. The window ratio needs to be widescreen to fit the fretboard.
Would love to hear from you at udit@gitori.com (Hacker News has no way to send me notifications on comment replies).
The "hardest notes to find" in the open center, away from anchor points, correspond to the areas that would be in laminar flow if the guitar neck was a cross-section of a flow channel.
As a person who performs a lot of music on various instruments, playing in "closed" positions where you don't know the note you're playing is a just-fine strategy.
There are reasons why folks know the names of notes in some positions better than others.
When I was playing a lot of bass for folks in low rent with bands that were playing standard music and never rehearsing, I generally only paid attention to the low string and worked my parts out (often on the fly) around the relative pitches.
If you're trying to keep up with the bass part on a song you've never heard before while performing it on stage, it's much more relevant (and far easier/faster) to know the position of the minor 3 note of the scale than it is to know what note is the minor 3.
Over the decades I play a lot more piano, and that changes. I play a lot of blues and jazz but am quite poor at reading typical rep for the instrument. While I started out mostly playing using chord fingerings (and inversions), the more I play the more specific I can get on my understanding of actual notes. Because I've been playing a lot of clarinet (which forces me to transpose a whole lot, including reading a part and transposing on the fly), the names of specific notes has gotten a whole lot more important, but also easier with practice.
On the pedal steel (which I have only been playing for a decade on and am still coming to terms with), while I can pull all that knowledge I am still usually playing based on a notes position- I know what string/lever combo is going to get the 6 note in a given scale rather than thinking "I need to play an A to get this C chord to be a C6, and that's this position on the neck with the BC pedals down or that position with the LKR lever pushed.
All that is to say, it's okay to not know the names of notes if you understand their function related to the melody.
Playing guitar, at least for me, is all geometry. The fifth is the next string two frets up (like the knight in chess, I just realized) and so on. Each chord is a shape - so if your starting with a note, you kind of know where to go after a while.
I've played guitar for over 30 years now, and it is 100% geometry to me, or Tetris pieces. A D chord is a triangle, A chord is a line, a minor barre chord with a root on the 2nd string is stair steps, etc.
One of the things that is bittersweet about learning a song is that it can take the magic out of the song; instead of just hearing it, I am thinking in chord shapes, positions, lead lines, etc.
I've got multiple ways of listening.
I can't even Phish because if I'm on drugs I fall into listening-like-I-need-to-play-the-next-chord. Whereas a lot of songwriter music I can listen-like-I'm-reading-underegrad-poetry
I do feel that way about tetris, too. I think the reason I enjoy older jazz standards on bass is playing them is a little like solving a suduko- I can get a satisfying answer without much more than the melody. That doesn't work for modern rock where the riff is key. That kind of "well, it sounds okay but it doesn't line up with my idea of what makes sense" is my own anti-magical-feeling.
Guitar music in particular has very little actual pressure on learning any music notation or theory. Some of the greatest guitar soloists of all time could not read sheet music and knew zero music theory. This is common enough where there's good odds if you just name a great guitarist, they are probably in this camp.
This is debatable because I dont know what you mean when you say they didnt know theory. Hendrix is a great example, supposedly he didnt know, but it is very clear he would play the pentatonic of the quality of chord he was playing over. Is that knowing theory? Or playing is playing the BB King box theory? Or is knowing the major scale theory? It's almost certain that the best guitarists that you're saying knew some of these things. So do you mean the nomenclature?
I mostly agree with this.
Like, I know what a secondary dominant is because I've had to use it in blues turn arounds- I didn't know that's what some folks would call it, but I knew that in the key of G, I'd often play an A instead of the Am.
And I think that the vocabulary should describe what folks do rather than the doings being driven by the vocabulary.
Most guitar players (and improv folks) that I know have much more theory that the folks who are reading but who generally don't think about what the function of their line is in a larger song.
If you're playing by memory and ear, you have to have some concepts because you can't just read a part.
Those concepts -are- the theory.
Yeah there's just a badge of honor to say that you don't know theory, as though it's something bad if you do, for some people, for some reason
I've seen it and I kind of get it. I have worked with folks who do things for theoretical reasons instead of describing what they do with these ideas.
At the same time, I wish more folks would learn to read music, or even be literate enough to read lead sheets- my life would be so much easier if folks could just show up and play the thing without spending hours learning from recordings and making whatever kind of esoteric notations they've made up.
In Miles Davis' autobiography, Davis talked about how they jammed a few times. Davis would tell him to play a particular chord or scale, and Hendrix had no idea what it was at first, e.g. "try an E minor diminished yada yada there... a mixolydian scale would work on top of these changes..."
Once Davis taught him the concepts he got them immediately, or it might be a chord he knew and played, but didn't know the formal name of. So, he was a brilliant intuitive musician, but didn't have the theory chops of someone who attended Juliard like Davis.
That is what we mean by Hendrix didn't know the theory.
Yeah he didn't know the names of the concepts that he already knew. My intuition says music theory is the understanding of the concepts, not the formal study of the names. Like a person that can only play the major scale because they studied the theory, in my mind they have less mastery of theory than a person that can compose "Little Wing" or "Lenny" without ever studying it.
To me, the theory is as much a communication tool as a knowledge. It is a common language for musicians to communicate musical ideas, at a higher level than musical notation. E.g. I can go to a jazz open mic, someone says the progression is "ii V I in Dminor", or a blues jam and its "I IV V, A major", or a Grateful Dead-type jam and its all mixolydian in B, and everyone is on the same page out of the gate. The theory is you know all of the scale modes, AND what they are called, AND can tell another musician what you're doing and why. Tons of people can play interesting things outside of the box, without know why or how it's defined.
I can get behind this definition. But even following that definition, people without theory knowledge who know how to play would know a third of theory if you split the three categories that you said equally. I venture to say that the concepts themselves weigh more than an even third though.
Right, you can be an incredibly articulate speaker without necessarily knowing the grammatical terms for the different parts of speech in each sentence.
I think there's a number of people who learned to play by ear who just sort of "internalized" theory without needing a formal curriculum.
Yeah, I just maybe think of theory as something else than something that can only be studied formally.
They have taste for sure and an ear for a blues lick, but they don't know formal theory. It's like how my cat understands gravity but has no awareness of formal gravitational theory or the maths involved.
The cat is a bad analogy. A better one for me would be like a mathematician that does a contribution to the field without formal education. Would you say they don't know any mathematics if they invented their own nomenclature?
Well it isn't like they are inventing their own nomenclature either. Where are Jimi's scale books he wrote in his own modes? He didn't operate in those terms. He was very much like my cat, having an insinct for a formalized theory he does not know the formalized language for.
Is it understanding formal music theory? No, only if you stretch the definition of formal music theory to include what is definitely not formal music theory by any one's definition.
Look at the tablature for little wing and you will see that he most definitely did some sort of theorizing, as he was very structured and systematic.
My point is that what he did is what music theory describes, and he definitely arrived there. He most definitely could play the scales and the modes, even if he never used the word dorian.
There is just some allergic reaction to the word that people take to mean something along the lines of demeriting the artistry. Had he learned the diatonic chords would that mean he is no longer a no theory guy, and would that make him worse?
I know thats not what you are saying, but i do see that from the hardcore 'theory is bad' proponents. Is theory the names of the relationship between tones, or the relationships themselves?
Except that Jimi Hendrix definitely knew music theory, no idea why you'd think he didn't. He had a great understanding of what he was playing.
He had a music theory I'm sure, but the overlap of that with what's currently being taught in conservatories (let alone what was taught in his time), I'm less sure about.
And?
I'm not really tracking where your confusion is. You can very much so do or "discover" something in practice that a theory describes without knowing that theory. I'd say it's even very common to "know" certain notes/chords/whatnot sound good with others and not learn "why" until later on, if ever.
My confusion is: why would you say that they don't know theory if they know the thing that the theory describes? If a person builds a radio by themselves, would you say that they don't know engineering because they didn't get a formal education on it? If a person figures out how to make a derivative, would you say they don't know mathematics because they didn't study it formally?
Well, yeah... absolutely. The theory describes why it works. I can know "this works" without knowing why it works.
Theory in my experience is much more descriptive than explanatory.
Anyone can clap hands and hum, the music isn’t the theory.
Anyone? I have a hard time finding the beat. If you ask me to count some 4/4 song, there's only about a 25% chance I get the one correct...
I'm a very beginner guitar player (and have been for about 30 years now) and I know a couple of simple songs. If I try to play along with a record, I'm fine until vocals kick in and then I instantly lose track of the beat and find myself strumming to the syllables of whatever the vocalist is singing.
I agree. But the theory is a way of structuring a system of names and shorthands to help codify what you know about producing music. At what point does your system for structuring the understanding you have about how to organize pitches in a way that you like become theory? Specially if it matches one for one to established concepts in academic music theory?
I’m not sure what you are saying.
Copy and paste “hello, world” ot install sqlite3 looks like computer science?
On some level, yes, knowing what shape an G chord is on a guitar is knowing some theory in the exact same way that being able to get hello world functioning in a language is necessary to starting to understand the broader elements of computer science.
Just because something is the Nth lowest first step does not mean it's not a step.
The theory is true, but no theory will make you perform quite like a legendary recording artist.
Yeah, it'd be nice if Berklee funk sounded good.
The argument was that the greatest guitarists didn't know theory so it doesn't equate to that. Hello world equivalent. It's more like building TempleOS or Rollercoaster Tycoon or building SQLite without getting a formal education somehow means you don't understand computer science
My examples are exaggerated or misleading. Other comment covers it I think.
There's a great clip (probably a bunch actually) of Jimi, on stage, holding up the band, counting frets one by one to find his starting position.
eg. Sweden 1969, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6oXvEbtx4L4&t=450s
It's just really all about the ear and there's plenty of fabulous guitar players who will tell you to transcribe Charlie Parker but tell you don't bother playing scales for hours a day
the only thing id clarify is that a lot of them won’t _formally_ know music theory, but their playing demonstrates can demonstrate a deep understanding of it.
Music notation on a 5-line staff is just another in the category of "shapes," along with pentatonic scales on a fretboard. Theory is another matter though.
Honestly, I know a ton of folks sitting 5th chair violin in a community orchestry or playing 3rd trumpet in a big band who have no idea what note in the chord they are playing and just reading and repeating the line.
Most of the musicians I know have very minimal theory, ironically even less than folks who can't read.
Any resources or advice for someone who might be interested in learning pedal steel?
I could never really bridge the gap between spoken language and execution on a guitar. I approach improvising and playing by intervals and shapes. For me I need to have direct access to the guitar that doesn't pass through language, as if the guitar was my mouth and I'd execute a chord or a melody as if it were a word or a sentence, without thinking about syntax.
This makes it hard to compose and study music, since I take a long time to transpose and navigate the harmonic field, but it's a tradeoff that I need to do, my brain doesn't work otherwise.
> I'd execute a chord or a melody as if it were a word or a sentence, without thinking about syntax
This is exactly the same for me. The guitar fretboard is essentially synesthesia for me when I hear music. I hear a melody and part of my brain feels the shape of the fingerings as I go. It’s been like this for maybe 30 years or so (I started guitar at a really young age.)
I have no idea if this is common for guitar players though (I assume so? If you’re the sort of player that can play solos, you probably already “audiate” sounds via fingering) but it means I can basically always immediately play a song after hearing it once, even if it’s just the basic melody. I also have what I’d call “weak” perfect pitch (I can easily conjure an E in my head and then figure out from there what note I’m hearing via well-trained relative pitch) so often I can get the exact notes right the first time.
One of the reasons why I play a whole lot of jazz standards on different instruments is because it builds that feeling of just "knowing" (if I can hear the notes in my head) what I should play. I find "youtube jam tracks" wholly unhelpful, but I spend a whole lot of time playing to backing tracks for stuff like "All of Me" or "Sweet Sue" and playing the melody in different positions/ registers. I have been finding that a lot better for my playing than doing scales (though I still work scales on instruments where I in a learning phase).
But that feeling of "just knowing" is common among a lot of instruments and players.
I know that if I play some fingering on the clarinet, or jut grab a chord on the pedal steel, or whatever it's going to do what I intend without thinking about naming what I intend to do, just like i don't think about spelling, punctation, or letter position when I type (even though I often need to edit LOL).
So I agree- if I am playing bass with folks I will often just start playing without thinking too much about what notes I am playing beyond trying to decide on the general tonic key of the song.
i also “see” guitar parts in my head while i listen to music.
Yes to all of this. I've played since 1993. Music <==> shapes are nearly equivalent for me now. It is cool to hear other people describe it too.
I've been having success playing as you describe, "ear to hand", and then once I have something I like, hand-writing it in tablature so I can lock in the notes.
Before this, I was _mostly_ remembering the "safe" notes, but the occasional stumbles break the flow badly, and the tabs have helped. Surprisingly, since I started doing this, its helped me memorize the scale and make fewer mistakes, generally.
I ran into that from the opposite side when I attempted to learn the guitar, coming from a background in classical piano and woodwinds: my whole conceptual architecture for intervals and harmonies was based on a linear arrangement of notes, and I could not get my head around the way a guitar wants you to sort of feel the shapes and positions of chords instead. Odd and disorienting experience.
I don't think it's realistic to draw conclusions between your skill at this game and the skill at finding a real note on a real guitar. I've been playing guitar for 35 years now and note finding is almost subconscious and relies on muscle memory. This is an inverted image from what you'd see anyway. I think all you can determine from this is that some people are good at a video game versions of the memory game.
If you practice this thinking it's going to translate to guitar, your wasting time that would be better spent playing guitar.
Having played this game hundreds (if not thousands) of times, I can assure you that it does make a difference. It's like saying "memorizing a map won't help you navigate the streets because the map looks nothing like the streets".
I recommend you give it a shot and see if it helps you. There's also a couple settings to "invert" the fretboard to your preferences if that's what you prefer.
Lastly, it's really fun to actually play the game with a real guitar. If you click/tap the note on top, it requests mic permissions and you're all set to now play with a real fretboard.
P.S. If you go down the real guitar route, try the Arcade Mode on find the Notes. It's the most fun thing I've ever built...a space invaders style game on the fretboard. But driven with a real guitar.
It's not actually an inverted image, though. It is exactly what you'd see if you tilt your head forwards.
However, my mental model of the strings is the fattest string on top, not on bottom.
you can try the "Front View Fretboard" setting. That'll help you map the fretboard better to how you visualize it
My mental model is a vertical fretboard for some reason. the horizontal layout makes me want to tilt my head..
> This is an inverted image from what you'd see anyway.
Not for me (lap steel). But then I don't play that in standard tuning; it's one of the few guitar tunings that is not useful at all.
FWIW, there's a bunch of tunings available on gitori if you're interested
I was just looking for information about that. I might look later on; I am at that point with my playing where I need to start to add theory to what I have learned in technique by ear. Thanks for your reply :-)
of course, anytime. Also, I have a dedicated theory course along the same lines as well (interactive lessons + games to learn + SRS to memorize). https://www.gitori.com/themes/music-theory
I've only played partially for about a few years and I can find most of the notes with my eyes closed. Then you have people like Steve Vai who are the in the guitar equivalence of magnus carlsen playing blindfold chess with 20+ people at once. Some people just like to yap to write something cool and get a few upvotes I guess.
The legend goes that Steve Vai showed up with a beat up guitar at Joe Satriani's place to get lessons from him . Satriani told him to come back after a week with all the notes memorized or he won't accept him as a student. Steve did as he was told and the rest is history.
So yeah, some of us are Steve Vais and others like me take months to learn it. To each their own.
I'm a jazz bassist, and I'm not surprised. There are notes that you typically play in certain positions, only because your hand was already in that position for another note. And even as a fluent sight-reader, I make my way around the fingerboard by a combination of note names, anticipation of familiar patterns and dumb luck. Plus, if I see a note on the page, I can often play it before I can name it, because those are different mental circuits.
This is fun. I have always said that a portion of my brain is dedicated to the fretboard. If I'm talking about intervals without an instrument in front of me I am always imagining the fretboard to find, say, a minor 6th from C#. I know the shapes of octaves across different strings very well, so even in the red zones I can find the notes pretty quickly. I cannot say the same for many of my bandmates, as talented as they are.
Would you please add a non Google sign up?
> Would you please add a non Google sign up?
I completely understand you wanting that. My concern is that I offer a 1 week free trial for all new accounts. There's nothing stopping people from making a new account every week with 10minutemail to use the app for free. Happy to make a "backdoor" email only account for paid users though.
I struggle even knowing what the notes are called, but have a rudimentry knowledge of what some chords are, but not why. All that matters to me is how it sounds, and since I am singing with guitar, improvising as I go , when someone asks what note or chords I am useing , I do struggle for an answer, but it occurs to me , now, to tell them to play whichever ones they like the most, and we will MAKE it work.
Learning the notes helped me immensely. Like, one of the lowest effort highest leverage activities. It took a few weeks of deliberate practice and it made a lot of things easier. I just followed this: https://youtu.be/PJddQ6Q0UDo?si=DCCtH5Y6RzHNY5Nn
Highly recommend it.
Am not sure if this is indeed what you are talking about but if it's the realisation that any song can be played in any key, and that you can mechanically 'transpose' (I think of it as shifting) any song in whichever key you want and more fundamentally, a tune is made of intervals, that was a big aha moment for me too.
The next was discovering the tonal center or 'root' of a song. A lot of gears clicked into place at that point.
Learn the notes on the E string, then the concept of an octave and how to find them.
If you play the open E string, the octave for this is on the D string 2nd fret.
The easiest way I found was to think of the notes on each of the strings are a repeated pattern starting in different positions.
Start with the whole notes (no sharps or flats)
EFGABCD ABCDEFG
Once you've got them down you can learn the sharps/flats
That's one way to do it. Honestly, that's the beauty of the guitar. You can just learn a handful of chord shapes and be off to the races. But it also turns into it's biggest weakness when people want to go deeper into learning and understanding the instrument.
take a look at this interactive course I made: https://www.gitori.com/learn/FBG-101 Once you finish that, you can start playing the accompanying games to practice what you learnt
The funny thing is that as a lap steel player, the middle to upper middle of the neck (5 through to 9) is where you live, because it interacts most usefully with the open strings in most tunings. Same is true of bottleneck slide to some extent.
I could have guessed. The tone and timbre of the middle strings - especially around the middle of the fretboard - are harder to tell the difference between a note on one string or its neighbor in a different position.
I'm surprised it's not all octave pairs, actually. Maybe if he used a lower threshold it'd emerge more as a pattern.
As a left-handed guitar player, that was really hard. I couldn't get any of them in time.
I'm a right-handed player and missed a bunch and then I quit. I wondered if maybe I somehow set it to an alternate tuning or something? Went back and realized they have the strings listed in the opposite order that I expected (my guitar has the low E on the top and the high E on the bottom).
Try the "Front View Fretboard" setting under settings in 5 minutes (it was broken, just pushed a fix)
"(my guitar has the low E on the top and the high E on the bottom)."
I wonder if it's because tab usually has "low" strings on the bottom, like in sheet music (lower pitches are at the bottom) and when we (guitarists) are playing chords with melody notes in them (bluegrass, jazz), we talk about the melody notes being on "top".
When I look at someone else holding a guitar, then the low E is on the top and the high E is on the bottom. But when I hold it, turn it 90° and look down at it, then the low E is on the bottom and the high E is on the top.
Which one did you mean?
hi there...assuming you're talking about the game itself, it has a left handed mode under Settings [Under dropdown you get when you click/tap the profile icon on top right)
No wonder the hedgehog is struggling to find the notes. The fret markers are in the wrong place.
I managed all of them, but it was hard to see exactly what the allowed region was.
hmm...is this roughly what you see as the highlight area?
https://imgur.com/a/Lee1HRu
I wonder if the contrast isn't high enough for some users. Honestly, this is the first time I've gotten this feedback. Maybe try the dark fretboard option? It looks like this:
https://imgur.com/a/prLpyOq
A bunch of bass players are laughing...
jk. I'm not that great either.
I got games and lessons for them too: www.gitori.com/bass ;)
That 2nd string warp may not get them but they still got a few notes to sort out in their head.
I've played guitar for over 30 years, some of them professionally. I have always struggled, still do, recognizing notes. Once I have some "anchor", no problem. But if someone whistles a random tone, and asks what key it is - I'm of no use. My absolute pitch is garbage, but my relative pitch is excellent.
if it helps...absolute pitch is _mostly_ a natural innate ability and cannot be trained.("Mostly" because recent studies have shown that you can train kids at an early age.) So you don't need to worry about not having absolute pitch, like you shouldnt worry about not having mensa level iq. What's more important though, is relative pitch, which most people can train for and is really valuable as a musician.
I was in some music classes early on (piano and guitar) and in band from middle school through the end of high school.
If I have perfect/absolute pitch (very doubtful), it's from having certain pitches absolutely burned into my brain. B-flat and F on brass instruments, C on piano, E on guitar, etc.
I can generally memorize and sing back the exact pitches of any song once I've heard it a few times. If I like the song enough, that pitch memory is forever. I will never sing it in the wrong key ever again and that's actually how I get around in music. I can always play back the original song in my head like a tape recording. I learned the names of some chords a long time ago from my favorite songs and now just know them by heart when I hear them (add9, sus4, minor 7th, etc).
Unfortunately, I cannot do this in reverse and name the notes or do any supernatural tricks like Rick Beato's kid. I would have to hum every individual note for a little while and run through the chromatic scale in my mind to tell you the name.
I think to a large extent, it can be trained. I didn't get started until I was like 8 years old and wasn't always the best student either. I hesitate to call this relative pitch because I don't need to hear an outside reference and I can very easily tell when an instrument is out of tune. I'm somewhere in between, and so are most band kids.
I've been struggling to memorize the entire guitar fretboard for several decades, and I blame the Germans! :-)
Context:
* in USA & Canada, notes are a-b-c-d-e-f-g
* Where I'm born though, due to Germanic tradition and influence, b is called h. b-flat is b.
* Given that most teachers start you with C major, it was taught as c-d-e-f-g-a-h
* And of course, where I'm born, you're first taught solfago (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-si/ti-do)
So my brain never really learned to think of musical notes as "alphabet". My natural inclination is solfago, and when I use the single letters, my brain interprets them as random string of letters that you have to think about every time (given that for whatever reason "H" is between "A" and "C"), rather than just alphabet. It's like I have two parallel sets of neural pathways: Alphabet - no problem, I can do it forward and backward reflexively, vs Musical Notes - stop all trains, engage upper brain functions, this is the difficult one with no sense or reason.
Grrr, Germans :=D
... that being said, I'll try the app :)
I started playing (learning) guitar once again.
Now that AI is here it's much easier to approach. It won't help fix my finger positioning but it helps a lot with exploring the theory.
I built a library for visualizing and playing everything: https://dsebastien.github.io/music-notation/
Then an Obsidian plugin on top: https://dsebastien.github.io/music-notation/
And an LLM wiki about the theory: https://notes.dsebastien.net/10+Meta/99+AI+Assistant/Wikis/M...
AI slop certainly but it helps me a ton!
Very cool. I just started using AI to do something far simpler. I will definitely check out your site.
I had restarted guitar after a 45 yr absence of playing. Took lessons for 9 months and progressed well, but hit a wall. I was going to look toward AI for help getting over the wall what you did looks promising. Thanks!
Site is annoying. Why does the window ratio need to be so widescreen? Why does the quiz run while the "tilt your phone" warning is up? Why is the highlighted area not clear? Why is there such a long delay? between hitting start and the game starting?
1. Fixed the timer when the tilt your phone is up. 2. Marginally increased the contrast for the highlighted area. 3. I can't recreate the delay between hitting start and the game starting. Can you help me reproduce it? 4. The window ratio needs to be widescreen to fit the fretboard.
Would love to hear from you at udit@gitori.com (Hacker News has no way to send me notifications on comment replies).
Stopped right after the hero image. If you can't even get the fretboard position markers right ... sigh
laminar flow
?
The "hardest notes to find" in the open center, away from anchor points, correspond to the areas that would be in laminar flow if the guitar neck was a cross-section of a flow channel.
Question mark granted