“Diatonic Fretboard Exercises” (DFE) and its sequel “Chromatic Fretboard Exercises” (CFE) together provide a wealth of sightreading material from over a thousand public domain sources collected over eight years, all arranged for playing in multiple positions on guitar and graded by computer so that you can develop your knowledge of the fretboard gradually, while you have some fun trying to identify the music before peeking at the answer. Even experienced sightreaders can get hooked into playing just one more piece.
But there is also a distinct method in all this material, and it addresses the fundamental challenge of sightreading on guitar: there's more than one way to play the same note. Other books begin with training you in first position: you see a note on the staff and remember how to play it in first position. But when you go to another position, you have learn that there's now another way to play that note. So some of the memory that let you play smoothly in first position has to be un-learned in order to add another position. Seeing a note in the music isn't enough to information to know where to play it.
In this book, you will begin by learning each new note in two positions, first and seventh, so your memory is being built explicitly on the context of where your hand is located, not just on the appearance of the note on the staff. It's like being taught by bilingual parents: you can converse equally well in both languages, instead of the second language seeming like a foreign language.
Thanks to computer analysis on this wealth of material, you will find a steady progression of music that is playable in both of those starting positions. And when you venture outside those positions, every piece will indicate all the other positions in which it playable, and even the difficulty of doing so. These books are all about learning in parallel positions even in chapters labelled for a single position. Just as there's more than one way to play a note, the computer shows when there is more than one position in which to play a piece.
But not one of these pieces is generated by computer or from random notes. Every piece of music is a real historical melody, many of which will sound familiar to you; and that's what helps you realize if you play a wrong note. You may mot know the piece but you'll probably know if you play it wrong.
Another innovation in this method is the use of “Musical Fretboard Diagrams” when you are learning how to play the notes. Instead of the usual diagrams you see (like the one on the front cover of this book) where spots on the fretboard are identified by a letter like “C” (with no indication of whether it's middle C or high C), you'll be seeing the actual appearance of the note on the staff for that spot on the fretboard. That way you build your visual recognition of notes on the staff while you are building your memory of where to play them.
Other features of this method are ways to find positions on the neck without looking at the neck, but by listening to particular tuning notes that match open strings when your hand is in the right position (see “Finding Positions With Ease (E's)”). Plus there are lots of other stories about the fretboard that help you remember a few odd notes, like where Beethoven played his sixth C (see “Playing With Your Nose”), or Poor Middle B in fifth position, or Ludicrous B as the highest note (in “Hairy Notes Outside the Staff”). These silly stories can make some long lasting memories to help your sightreading by making it personal.
These books assume you are comfortable with basic music notation and simple rhythms. That you can understand the notes; you just can't find them on the fretboard fast enough to sightread on guitar, particularly in the higher positions.
Actually, in this method, you don't even need to know the names of the notes on the lines and spaces of the staff. You'll visually recognize the placement of a note on the staff and know spatially where to place your finger on the fretboard to play it, thanks to the Musical Fretboard Diagrams.
Getting the rhythms right can still be a challenge, even for experienced sightreaders. But knowing when to move your fingers is different than knowing where to move them. You may find that you learn how to read rhythms from playing enough notes to recognize a familar melody where you already know the rhythm. Once you recognize the piece, you can study how the notation was writing its rhythm. It's something you can learn from experience.
These initial books in the series are all about finding notes on the fretboard while looking straight at the music; they encourage you to focus on your left hand, for now, without ever actually looking at it. Yes, your right hand's ability to sound the notes and play the rhythms will get a workout, but these exercises are aimed at the left hand.
To keep everything else simple while you're learning the fretboard, all the pieces are strictly monophonic melody lines; no polyphonic voices nor even any chords. This also maximizes the number of positions in which each piece can be played and allows an objective grading of the comparative difficulty of those positions.
The aim of this book is to cover the entire fretboard, but not in any one exercise. The pieces have been edited, where necessary, so that each melody will fit within the range of an individual position of four adjacent frets. You may have to stretch to an adjacent fret to get a missing note, but your left hand can remain in one position for the entire exercise, which means your eyes can remain on the music and there's no excuse for looking at the fretboard. You're still encouraged to play the same piece in multiple positions; but you'll never have to change positions in the middle of piece.
In this beginning book of the series, all the pieces are simple diatonic melodies in the key of C (or A minor), in order to focus on learning the natural notes first. There are no sharps or flats, and no accidentals in this book. Those colorations are introduced in the next book, “Chromatic Fretboard Exercises”.
All of the music consists of melody lines, mostly familiar, derived from various public domain sources. The simple diatonic melodies in this first book draw heavily from traditional nursery rhymes, children's songs, Christmas carols and folk songs, as well as some themes from classical music. Their familiarity helps you recognize if you play a wrong note, as long as they're not so familiar you start playing by ear. Because of editing for playability, there is no assurance of authenticity relative to the original sources. And not every melody will be familiar to you. Thus, you still need to play by sight.
Exercises are identified only by number; all the titles have been relegated to the index in the back, meaning you have to sight read the music carefully just to know what it is, rather than playing by ear based on the title. Look up that exercise by number in the Exercise Index or, in the web edition, hover the cursor in the blank area at the top of each music page to reveal its title. So read the music and have fun guessing the tune while you're at it.
You learn quickly that certain positions on the neck are better suited to playing in the key of C than other positions. The sweet spots are at positions I and VII (i.e. with first finger of the left hand at the first or the seventh fret, respectively). Those two positions are unique in that you can play all the natural notes in that range without ever having to stretch your left hand into a neighboring position. And position VII has the added bonus of being more compact than position I, making it even easier, especially for smaller hands. So that's where this book starts.
This book is organized into groups of melodies that are playable in particular positions, allowing you to match your sight reading practice with the positions where you are still learning the notes on the fretboard. Group A has melodies in the 13 note range that can be played in both positions I and VII, and therefore also at all the other positions in between, though with more effort. This is to encourage you to learn positions I and VII simultaneously from the start.
By becoming equally at home in these two simplest positions, your brain adjusts naturally to the notion that there is more than one way to play a given note on the guitar, making it easier for you to learn additional positions; the same way that bilingual children don't grow up thinking of other languages as “foreign” languages. And learning just these 13 notes in positions I and VII means you will have learned 62% of the 42 natural notes on the neck below the 12th fret (and you already know the notes at the 12th fret).
After Group A's emphasis on what is common to positions I and VII, the next two groups focus on what is different. Group B has melodies reaching the 4 low notes that are playable in position I but not VII, and Group C conversely has melodies touching the 4 high notes playable in position VII but not I. In terms of progress, adding Group B puts you at 71% of the neck and Group C at 81%. Next, Group D introduces 8 new notes in position V, filling the gap between positions I and VII, thereby bringing you up to 100% of the neck below the 12th fret! Finally, Groups E and F cover the high end of the fretboard with positions IX and XII.
But you don't have to follow this particular progression if you and your instructor have other plans. The annotations and gradings described below can help you chart your own path across the fretboard.
Each exercise in this book is annotated with a list of all the positions in which that exercise is playable, along with a grade on the scale from 0 to 9, with 0 being the easiest and 9 the most awkward, of how easy it is to play that exercise in that position. The positions are indicated by Roman numerals and the grades follow in Arabic numerals, as shown below:
If you are just starting, look for the 0's (meaning absolutely no stretching) and 1's (meaning no more than about 10% of the notes are awkward to finger). More experienced readers may choose to play each piece in all its listed positions. Others may look for just the single position they're learning at the time (e.g. most of the position II pieces can be found in Groups A and B).
You can also use this book to learn notes one string at a time, instead of one position at a time (both are valuable skills). If a particular melody is playable in it's entirety on a single string, each such string number is circled at the end of the list of playable positions, just as though the string itself were a kind of position.
For example (as shown above) we see that Exercise 1 can be played entirely on string ③ or entirely on string ④. Melodies such as this with a narrow range of notes often have more than one such string on which they are playable, in which case the lower numbered string is generally the easiest.
Each piece also employs a musical marking called an ambitus to the left of the clef sign indicating the highest and lowest notes. Such markings are more common in vocal music, so a performer can know at the outset whether the piece is within their vocal range. Here it gives the student/instructor a quick way to see if a piece is within the range of notes that are under study for a particular position. In general, a narrow ambitus is also another indicator of an easier piece.
Because these exercises are intended to be played in multiple positions where different fingers would be used to play the same note, there are no explicit fingering marks in any of these exercises. Instead, you should try to use “standard position fingering” where finger 1 covers the first fret of whatever position you're at, finger 2 covers the 2nd fret, and so on. See the examples given in the next section on “Musical Fretboard Diagrams”.
When your sight reading skills improve past just getting the notes and into recognizing chord arpeggios or following phrases, you'll need to move beyond standard position fingering, but at least you'll have the habit of using all four fingers.
Finally, about that word “Exercise”. Although this book follows the convention of listing each piece as a numbered exercise, the exercises here are intended to be read once and forgotten, not memorized and repeated. These are not finger exercises for muscle strength or dexterity. They're mental exercises to test and develop your recognition of notes on the staff and your knowledge of their locations on the fretboard.
Think of each new note you see as a miniature flash card test: as soon as the note flashes into view, you move your finger to play the sound, your ears tell you if you get it right, and the whole time your eyes are fixed on the note, thereby programming the entire sensory experience (eyes on note, fingers on fretboard, sound in ears, pleasure of success) into your vast neural network (brain).
If you're going to learn to sight read, you must play each note by sight, not by recalling the tune. As soon as you find yourself knowing the next note without looking at the staff, stop! You are no longer sight reading. Worse yet, if you find yourself looking at the fretboard instead of the music, your fingers will quickly learn to be guided by your eyes instead of by their sense of touch and spatial position. Vision easily dominates our other senses, so watch where you're looking!
Do not practice these exercises, otherwise you'll be learning the test rather than testing your learning. Just move on to the next exercise or a different position on the same exercise. That's why there are so many of them. This book has 1200+ exercises from 500+ different melodies, and the next book, Chromatic Fretboard Exercises, is just as big. You should have no shortage of fresh sight reading material and no need for repetition.
