Fretboard Memorisation with Modular Arithmetic
ohaodha.ie
ohaodha.ie
And good thing I did, I went to my local thriftshop and bought Hal Leonard’s Method for a couple of bucks, and have been going through it on a daily basis (now on song 67 of 100) and I am already starting to get an intuitive feel for where to move my fingers and which string to pluck within a beat or two, or rather, my muscles simply know where to move after reading the note (albeit quite often a beat or two late; though I suppose this will improve with practice).
---
* This comes from a) having played the trumpet when I was a child (including reading standard notation), b) tried to learn the guitar for a few months 20 years ago and then give up, c) BSc in psychology, and d) done some hobby projects which involved modular analogue synthesizers and the low level Web Audio API
That phrase is smuggling in a LOT of work that systems like CAGED help to simplify. I say this as someone who has played guitar for decades and slept on CAGED for too long.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gg1L-sBIxnY&list=PLJwa8GA7pX...
(It's funny how different instruments live in their own worlds. Once I showed a movable scale fingering diagram for guitar to a cello player and they had no idea what I was talking about, even though the cello has the same kind of patterns, as would any parallel-stringed instrument. Another cello player did know about scale patterns but called them "universal fingerings".)
* Fretted cellos would have the same fingering positions as unfretted cellos (frets are placed where the notes are, they don't set where the notes are).
* All parallel-stringed instruments have modular fingering patterns like this (though not exactly the same fingering patterns, if their string interval differs) so this is a good principle to try no matter your instrument.
Learning both guitar and cello is kind of like learning both QWERTY and Dvorak. Same intellectual principle, whole different muscle memory.