Marc Scheffel

November 19, 2013

My hope in starting this website and blog is to make updates and new insights available and respond to questions or concerns of anyone who has interest in my book, Fretboard Positions Diagram. The website has free sample pages from the book and a store to point the way to buying the paperback, eBook, and pdf versions. Also, I'm planning to have some videos put together before too long to expand on some of the concepts in the book.

The first thing I would like to say in this blog is…

 E R R A T A 

October 23, 2014  In the Chapter on The Major and Minor Scales, there's a tablature that shows an example of playing all twelve Major Scales near the 5th fret. Within the sentence immediately before the tablature, "ending with the D Position in the Key of G# Major" should say "ending with the E Position in the Key of G# Major".

June 11, 2014 This isn't an error, but an answer to a question that may come up: Why is the A Position the only Position to have square alternate notes shown…

Rule of Thumb for knowing which Fretboard Position matches the Mode you want to play

Judging by my own efforts to learn the five Fretboard Positions, it can take quite a while to get to the point where they are well-memorized. A big help recently came to me that can speed up memorizing the Positions and relating the Modes to them.

For the "Two and Three Notes on a String" Scale Patterns (the CAGED Scale Patterns), recognize how the five fingering sequences always fall in relation to each other…

Please click on the images above to download pdfs

After practicing the "Two and Three Notes on a String" Scale Patterns for some time over the CAGED Chord Shapes along the fretboard, I began to notice that my fingers were performing repeating actions on adjacent strings. There are 5 actions that my fingers performed when playing across the strings, then the actions would start to repeat on the remaining string. But it's a little tricky crossing the G and B strings and realizing where the repeating…

Here are a few ideas that have helped me to learn and remember the main fingering patterns (colored circles) that are shown in the Fretboard Positions Diagram:

• As mentioned in the chapter on Major Scale Modes, the Ionian Mode starts on the root note of the Major Scale and is played the same as the Major Scale. The Aeolian Mode starts on the 6th degree of the Major Scale and is played the same as the Natural Minor Scale. The Ionian Mode (or Major Scale) and the Aeolian Mode (or Natural Minor Scale)…

When posting on a forum today about CAGED guitar books, it occurred to me that there are so many aspects of playing guitar, and so many opinions on what works best or right ways and wrong ways.

I used to think that I had to keep my fingers aligned uniformly a short distance from the fretboard to be able to play solos fast, probably from something I read. Later, when studying up on one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Eric Johnson, it became apparent that my finger obsession was worthless…

I have never actually played the violin, but have looked at some of the techniques online. I was curious about it because violinists seem to play with so much confidence and effortless speed.

Of course, violinists practice for years, normally under a classical teacher. It's pretty much monophonic, with fiddle players being the exception, so they don't learn a lot of different chords on the instrument. They have the advantage (but also the challenge) of using a bow which makes everlasting sustain…