It’s easy to forget the fundamentals when you’re busy tackling next-level feats, but here’s why a clear foundation of knowledge and understanding of the fretboard can transform your playing
With the guitar world so full of dazzling players and flashy tricks it’s easy to get distracted. We’re not here to discourage you from mastering nose harmonics – big up Mike Dawes – but it’s important not to forget about the road in front of you when you’re looking up at the sky above. There might be a pothole ahead.
Modern Metal Academy is proud to have partnered up with John Huldt, who’s worked with Bare Knuckle Pickups and Bad Cat Amps, once again to deliver a comprehensive run-through of the key fundamental basics of guitar playing.
The lessons will help refine your core knowledge of scales, triads, and the CAGED system to help you become a better improviser and ensure you know the fretboard like the back of your hand.
Think you’re beyond the basics? Read on…
Pentatonics
As Hudlt says, the pentatonic scale is “the foundation for just about all rock and blues music; you’ve heard it a bazillion times before in guitar solos.” As such, it pays dividends to brush up on the scale occasionally.
Most of you reading this right now will have the basic pentatonic shape drilled into your head, but how well do you know the other shapes? These shapes are easy to forget as you add new – and, honestly, sexier – skills to your trick bag. But they are essentially treasure maps to shred gold.
Break out of the cycle
As players, we are all guilty of over using certain licks, even if we don’t know it. This was one of the core reasons we spoke about why guitarists should always record their playing to help recognise those predictable and stop your playing from becoming boring quickly.
Having all the pentatonic shapes across the neck ingrained into your brain can help you break out of your current cycle and come up with new licks that you can learn to rely on as well as your old favourites.
With each new shape comes a host of new possibilities, even though the notes are exactly the same. By nailing these, you’ll find that suddenly your playing is full of fresh life and ideas.
In his lessons, John will guide you through some common patterns and useful tricks across these shapes too, helping inspire you to find note constellations to call your own.
The CAGED system
By his own admission, John says the CAGED system “isn't very metal,” but it is vital in helping you become a metal god.
Why? Because it helps you envision the hiding places of chords across the entire fretboard. Like with the basic pentatonic shape, it's likely that most readers will know how to play the basic chord shapes across the first few frets, and probably even a handful of barre chords too. But the CAGED system helps players go far beyond that.
If you're playing rhythm particularly and you need to play a certain chord, the CAGED system helps you find that specific chord as close to you as possible. By learning to play the same chords in different spots, everything from the voicing of the chord to the thickness of the strings you're playing to the tension of the strings in relation to where you finger them can give it a fresh tonality.
That’s why you often see sparkling indie bands like Foals playing barre chords way past the 12th fret. You may cynically see that and think “why don’t you just play it on lower frets a string up instead?” but it is a conscious choice because of the vibe rooting a chord on the 15th fret of the low E string has over rooting it on the 7th fret of the A string.
The CAGED system can be seen as a cheat sheet for finding these chords for both conscious musical decisions and ease of transitions between chords. If the only Fmin you know if is on the firs fret of the low E but all your other chords are between the 7th and 12th frets then you’re going to struggle to smoothly jump between the two spots of the fretboard when strumming out a progression.
Triads
A triad is three notes – the root, the third, and the fifth, and they are the foundation for all major and minor chords.
In his lesson, John regularly underlines the importance of knowing your way around the fretboard. Think of yourself as the captain of a ship, if you don't know how to navigate the seas, you'll never reach your required destination, and in that respect, triads are a great way of connecting one part of the fretboard to another.
As he explains, triads have a direct correlation with sweep picking patterns, the CAGED system and much more, and they can be used as bridges between them. For lead playing, this can help you unlock new ways to play along and against chord progressions in new ways.
The notes of the triads can be played in unison for thicker moments in your soloing, or they can be played simultaneously for ways to jump from one section of the neck, where you have a score of licks under your fingers, to another, where more licks lay waiting.
John will guide you through triads and their inversions across the strings for ways to add colour and mood changes to your playing and this is important. We all want to feel like we can stand at the top of Shred Mountain and melt faces like there's no tomorrow, but without adding major or minor flourishes to your playing it can lack emotion which is, above all other reasons, what the average listener looks for in music.
Relearn to reignite
I’ve been playing guitar for around 17 years. I covered the basics of guitar playing a long time ago, but not all of that knowledge has stuck with me.
I studied Spanish at school, but because I haven’t kept speaking and using the language in everyday life, it has long since escaped my brain. The same applies with the fundamentals of guitar playing knowledge, and it can be an empowering experience to use these skills to break out of creative ruts and enliven your playing with some new zest.
Head over the Modern Metal Academy blog page for more tips, tricks and hacks.
Level up your playing in just 30 days
Modern Metal Academy isn’t just another guitar learning platform, it’s a revolutionary community and support network where players can get direct feedback and advice from like-minded players, get inspired by each other’s creativity, and instill the knowledge and skills you need to become a riff machine.
We're here to simplify your guitar journey to help you see huge improvement in a short space of time. Our lessons focus on helping you master the core pillars of modern metal guitar playing, endurance, stamina, precision, strength and control via a clear lesson plan that, with just 30 minutes of your time each day, can turn you into the guitar player you've always wanted to be.
Interested? Head over to our pricing page to learn more about your sign up options.
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