Is TAB bad for JAZZ? and Fretboard Mastery: NOTES or INTERVALS?? 🃏🎸👐

Learn the guitar Fretboard by Notes or Intervals? And is TAB part of what's holding you back??

🎸 This seems to be a question which comes up a lot, and if you ask me the answer is actually pretty simple. After teaching hundreds of jazz guitar students over the last 25 years I've seen people hit the same stumbling blocks over and over again. A common one is not learning the basics of music (note I don't use the word 'theory' which makes it sound like something separate from music itself), like the musical alphabet, and the way notes relate to one another - ie Intervals, Chords, Scales, etc.

📞 I think TAB is often partly to blame. It has its uses, but often it leads to avoiding learning the basics of music and prevents us from being able to speak the language of music and be able to communicate with non-guitarists.

🔮 I don't think that this applies to everyone (and I'm certainly not judging anyone for not being able to read music), but in the realm of jazz it's only in very rare cases that the great players were unable to read music - and certainly most of them understood music theory and knew the notes on the fretboard. The remaining few were geniuses...

📽 What to watch next:

CAGED is the MOTHER of ALL SYSTEMS:

GUITAR FUNDAMENTALS:

'Students often ask me: "Should I do
A or should I do B?" Most of the time
I ask them: "Why not do both?"

- Mick Goodrick 🧙‍♂️

Link to the wonderful interview with Alvaro Pierri:

[The part I mention about 'Curiosity' is towards the end of the video]

CONTENTS:

PART 1

00:00 - Introduction
00:32 - A Prisoner of TAB's
01:38 - Isn't it Hard to Read on Guitar?
03:08 - A Barrier to Entry
04:22 - Am I Saying TAB is Bad?
05:18 - Advantages of Standard Notation

PART 2

06:07 - Learn the Fretboard: Intervals or Notes?
06:53 - A Couple of Examples
09:13 - Wise Words From the Masters
11:05 - Jam Out...

Thanks for stopping by the MUSIC MAGUS channel, and as always, all the best with your music.

Aleister James Campbell 🤠🤘

#jazzguitar #jazzguitarlesson #fretboardmastery #musicmagus #jazzguitarist

[music_magus]

Hey everyone, thanks for stopping by the MUSIC MAGUS channel! Any comments and questions welcome. And just to be clear - I'm not judging anyone who can't read music, but I do think that if you're serious about learning to play jazz then it's in your best interest to learn. In my opinion it will be time well spent! 

All the best with your music..!

AjC 🤠🤘

[jfar]

Hi
So interesting. Knowing notes is of course essentiel if you want to navigate the fretboard, to know which arpeggios and licks (yes licks, you gotta know what key it's in and where to play it!) etc have to played at any given time. Obviously, knowing intervals AND some CAGEDish system shapes (whether it's scales, arpeggios etc) is also essential, when used in combination with notes knowledge.

NOW 2 points:
1) as a former classical guitar player (not a good one), I'm not sure that reading music is very useful when it comes to improvising. If anything, it helps to learn the notes on the fretboard, but other than that I think jazz and non classical improvisers shouldnt spend too much time on it.
2) This is proven by the fact that you don't think about NOTES when you're improvising, you use notes to know where to start position yourself at the begining of the phrase, like a compass, but then you just play the phrase (whether from muscle memory, shapes, intervalic knowledge on the guitar). BUT this is UNIQUE to guitar! And this is what people mean when they say that reading on the guitar is hard. It's not that it's necessarily difficult, just not convenient. Do HORN players think about notes when they improvise? YES OF COURSE! THEY HAVE NO VISUAL CUE! The staff is mapped in their brain and that's what they visualize while improvising. For obvious reasons, we don't it's the fretboard we visualize. Same for piano; while the piano is a visual instrument, it pretty much replicates the staff. And same for violin! While we may think that violin is closer to the guitar, the way notes are laid out is more ''musically natural'', and closer to the piano in a weird way than the guitar.

Reading staff music is only helpful when improvising if it serves as a mental visualisation tool, like horn players. Not only do we not really need that tool, it's time wasted if we spend too much time on it, as the fretboard as a visualization tool is already complex and confusing enough as it is. Our brain cannot adopt 2 visualization systems at once, impossible, and your video proves it (don't think about notes when improvising). Therefore, while it is important to have some basics in music reading as a guitar player, it's not that useful when it comes to improvising.

[jonbuckner]

Did you have to almost erase your metal muscle memory to replace with jazz phrasing muscle memory?