DAY 1 - Jumping Freely Around the Fretboard

SFS Fretboard Secrets

Course Progress:

DAY1 - DAY2 - DAY3 - DAY4 - DAY5 - DAY6 - DAY7

In this lesson from the original SFS Fretboard Secrets course, we take a look at how SFS allows you to improvise freely, everywhere on the guitar fretboard. We are going to start with a simple system for Blues Scales to get you introduced to the concept. But this is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more coming in the following lessons!

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šŸ“– Video Transcript:

    Hello there, and welcome to SFS Fretboard Secrets!


    My name is Prokopis Skordis, and Iā€™m the creator of the SFS Series of courses and lessons. Some of you may already know that SFS stands for "String Fragment System", and that it is a highly effective way to learn new musical elements, very quickly, everywhere on the guitar fretboard.


    If you are new to this system, then this is a good day in your guitar life, because what you are going to learn here will set you free, as it has for so many of my students and online viewers. You will be able to move freely on the fretboard in no time.


    SFS works for all kinds of structures, but right now we will mainly focus on scales because thatā€™s where the benefits of SFS become immediately obvious. 


    But before we get started, I wanna let you know that I have a couple of welcome gifts for you, that you can get by clicking the links below. The first one is lifetime streaming and download access to the Fretboard Memorization Toolbox. This is one of my most popular mini-courses. It has been downloaded more than 1000 times last time I checked, so many of you may have it already. But if you donā€™t, I highly recommend that you get it. Itā€™s a really effective, and fun way to learn the notes on the fretboard. Weā€™ll talk about your second gift as we go into our lesson because it has to do with what weā€™ll be talking about here.


    So, back to SFS. If you are like me, then at some point in your guitar life, you decided youā€˜d like to learn how to improvise, you know, play some lead lines. And someone probably told you that you should start by memorizing box shape scale patterns. Now, this seems like such a great idea in the beginning, because without knowing anything, you immediately begin to get the right notes by playing what you see in those diagrams, right? But sooner or later, most guitar players realize that, first of all, this is an extremely boring way to learn, and that if you want to be a really good lead player, who moves freely on the fretboard, and attempt to do it this way, the amount of box shape memorization you need to do becomes ridiculous!


    And even if you do a lot of this boring memorization work, you still feel that you donā€™t really understand whatā€™s going on. Itā€™s very limiting. You just memorize and hope for the best. 


    Well, Iā€™ve been there, many of my students over the years have been there, and judging from the many messages I get from EMP viewers, and the comments in my lesson pages, everyone has been there. And it just doesnā€™t work. From my own experience, Iā€™m telling you that when I studied in Berklee College of Music, and met, and talked to some great players, I realized that the really good improvisers were very few and that most of them shared one common characteristic: They used personal, effective approaches to learning, that were different, and outside the norm of traditional teaching. You just canā€™t get that good doing the same old things.


    So this is the kind of thing I will show you here. An extremely effective new approach. I had this breakthrough while experimenting back in 2009-2010, and it has changed my way of learning and teaching forever! Iā€™m serious. If this is your first ride with SFS, you will be very surprised at how much you are going to learn, just in this first lesson.


    Iā€™m going to start with an application of SFS for Blues scales. If you are familiar with my SFS Pentatonics methods, then you may know most of this already, but stick around anyway because Iā€™m going to present this with some fresh twists you will enjoy.


    So letā€™s say someone wants to learn the A minor Blues scale everywhere on the guitar fretboard. Here it is: Chaotic right? Now traditional wisdom would have us break this into 5 box shapes, that look like this, and memorize them, and somehow know where to place each one on the fretboard. Again, this doesnā€™t help much right?


   Well hereā€™s what I realized when I started off with SFS. I wasnā€™t actually working on blues scales at the time, but itā€™s the concept thatā€™s important because as soon as I figured this out, I immediately applied it to EVERYTHING. I even RE-learned scales that I already knew, because of all the improvisation advantages you will see as we proceed. So what I noticed, is that when you look at the root note, A, and put your first finger on it, you always find the next scale tone up, three frets above it [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO].


    Of course, that makes sense because musically itā€™s the same structure, the same scale, everywhere. But I was just so blinded from mindless memorization that I never paid the proper attention to this. So we can find this string fragment, which we will label SF1 in every one of the 5 box shapes. But what if we forget about box shapes altogether, and just play this string fragment on every A on the fretboard? Itā€™s just 2 notes, but we can do a lot with them.


    When I teach pentatonics and blues scales to my students, I have a list of improvisation tips that we begin to apply to this, sticking to just 2 notes, on purpose. Of course, you will need to know where all the Aā€™s are, but you need to know those anyway, for a million other reasons. Just in case you donā€™t know them though, your 2nd gift is lifetime stream and download access to the complete SFS Fretboard Secrets mini-course, which includes tables that show you the root notes in every key in the PDF notes, as well as lesson videos, backing tracks, and diagrams of everything we will learn here. So for now, if you donā€™t know where the Aā€™s are, just follow along in order to understand how this works, and you can learn them later. 


    But letā€™s get back to our A minor Blues scale. The next string fragment up from SF1 always looks like this: 2 notes, and the blue note in the middle. Letā€™s call this SF2. This too appears in all box shape, but let's not think in terms of box shapes. Just jump between the Aā€™s on the fretboard. Obviously, I now have more notes to play with [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO].


    Now we can spend days learning to do a lot with these 2 string fragments. But the main benefits are instant. We get to jump between fretboard areas with a freedom that is unmatched by other approaches. Wanna play up high? just go to a high root note [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO]. Wanna go low? Find a low one [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO].


    Letā€™s add SF3 and do the same thing. Do you see? SF3 is the next string fragment up in all fretboard positions [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO]. Now at this point, we begin to notice 2 things that are important to know when using SFS. First of all, we are starting to have overlap. The last note of SF3 is the first note of SF1 of the next fretboard area. Weā€™ll have a lot more of that happening. And thatā€™s great because we can take advantage of that and connect horizontally, but I donā€™t want to get into that right now. Weā€™ll talk more on that in another lesson.


    The other thing I want you to notice is that when we cross into the top 2 strings, our system shifts one fret up. You see, the system based on string 4 has SF3 shifted up [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO], and the system based on string 3 has both SF2 and SF3 shifted [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO]. Thatā€™s because of a discrepancy in the guitarā€™s tuning.


    But I donā€™t want to go on a tangent talking about that either right now, because I want us to focus on the system. Just remember to shift when crossing from string 3 into strings 2 and 1. Weā€™ll talk more about this again later.


    So right now, we went through 3 string fragments, and already we can play an octave of the A minor blues scale, in multiple places on the fretboard [EXAMPLE IN VIDEO]. If we continue doing this, we just need to add 2 more string fragments, for a total of 5, and every area on the fretboard will be covered. You will be able to play all box shapes, without ever memorizing them.


    In addition, you will be relating everything to the root note, which helps a lot with controlling the sound and developing the ability to play meaningful melodies with these notes. There are more benefits to this, but I canā€™t get into all of them yet. This is just the introduction. And I could show you all 5 string fragments right now, like I do in some other videos, but experience has shown me that breaking this into smaller practice steps brings better results musically. After all, itā€™s not just about learning the positions in 5 minutes. We want to make this musical and creative as well.


    But you may be wondering "is this just a shortcut? A get good quick scheme? is it cheating?" Well No! To get really good with SFS you still have to do a fair amount of practice, but the results are amazing. You learn faster, you donā€™t waste time, and itā€™s a lot of fun. You see, even if you just learn the 3 string fragments we learned today, you can already make music, and you have a different kind of freedom, jumping around the fretboard, which makes improvisation a lot more interesting than staying stuck in a box shape. At the end of this lesson, I will play a bit for you, using only what we learned today so that you can see this in action.


    The more I teach this and get all these emails and feedback about how SFS solves problems that fellow guitar players had for years, I get more and more excited about it. SFS is one of the breakthroughs that skyrocketed my own progress, and it has worked wonders for others as well. So I'm going to help you experience this same kind of superfast progress, even in the confines of this small mini-course.


    So this was just an introduction. Thereā€™s a LOT more coming up, so donā€™t miss the rest of these lessons. In the next one, we will look at a  similar application for the Dorian mode, which is a very useful, and very cool sound to have in your soloing toolbox. The best way to make sure you donā€™t miss any of this is to get the mini-course package for free using the link below. You will get lifetime streaming and download access on all your devices, and it includes all lessons, PDFā€™s with all diagrams, free backing tracks for practice, and some extra bonus stuff as well.


    So until I see you again in the next lesson, please use the comments below to let me know what you think about SFS. If my other SFS crash courses are any indication, I expect to hear a lot of excited responses from people who are fed up with memorizing box shapes. I would also be very happy to hear from those of you that do have experience with SFS. So go ahead and speak out, Iā€™d love to hear from you, and Iā€™ll do my best to answer any questions.


    This is Prokopis from EffectiveMusicPractice. Thank you for watching, and remember to enjoy your practice, and be effective!

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