Connecting the dots

This guitar book is written as a musical diary and far from finished. It will describe me, creating a personal road-map on the fretboard of my guitar. A mental image that will allow me to improvise with harmony. After 25 years of playing, I still get lost too many times in the matrix that spreads out over the entire fretboard. Navigating through the matrix is an art in itself that can always be improved. Everybody who wants to improvise on the guitar, needs to create a detailed mental map of the fretboard with some logic behind it for navigation purposes. Muscle memory alone is not enough when you need to orient yourself and choose any direction while playing. If you rely on muscle memory only, it will become very difficult to come up with new ideas on the spot. I strongly believe, that this is the reason why most of the times I find myself playing only the things I already know and that I have played already a million times before. But this is not what I want. I want to surprise myself with new sounds while improvising. I will use this book to document my search for the 'holy grail'.

I have spent many hours playing mostly single note lines. Therefor, I feel pretty comfortable on the fretboard while doing so. However, the way harmony can be played on a guitar has never been a real topic in my guitar studies. As a result of this, my mental map shows almost no routes for harmony during an improvisation. This does not mean that I can't imagine or hear harmony in my head, it's just that my fingers don't know where to go, in order to produce those sounds. This feels very frustrating. Specially when your in the middle of a great improvisation, and at some point you get stuck because of some 'technical' issue. Because that is what it is. You lack some technical skills in order to finish your improvisation successfully. And in my case, the technical issue is perhaps a lack of knowledge about harmony, but most of all its about not knowing where to put my fingers on the fretboard, in order to produce the sounds I hear in my head.

Now, for me the time has come, to give harmony the top priority in my playing. I have to step out of my comfort zone, which is playing melodies. Instead, I have to play harmony as much as I can. The balance in my playing capabilities is very disturbed. I strongly believe that in order to grow musically, a good balance is required. You need to be capable of playing melodies, but also of playing the harmony that supports the the melody. If both skills are not equally developed, one day the weaker part will hold you back from any further musical growth. This is what I am experiencing right now. Therefor my first and most important 'short term' goal is to restore balance. Of course I am aware of the fact that you can't learn harmony in a week or so. It is more likely to take several years. But the reason I have called it a short term goal, is because it is only a first step towards my ultimate goal, which is:

Play anything I hear, instantly.

So there is a lot for me to discover and to learn. Although new insights need to find their way into my playing rather than ending up in this book, it is always useful to take notes. They will not only enable me to track my progression, but hopefully this book will show the most important parts of the path I have followed in order to realize it. So it might pass my experiences and knowledge on to anybody else who is interested.

Kind regards,

Ruckola
December 2017