This is a brilliant way to reinforce your knowledge of where the notes lie on the bass guitar fretboard. I picked this up from the great man’s book ‘Joe Satriani Guitar Secrets’.
Use this exercise after you have looked at ‘How To Find Any Note On The Bass Guitar’, ‘4 Very Useful Octave Patterns For Bass Guitar’ and ‘3 Points On The Fretboard You Should Know’. Those 3 lessons (with their diagrams and videos) should give you a pretty good idea of how notes work and where they are located. This exercise will increase the speed at which you can find the notes.
1. Set a metronome to a comfortable (slow) tempo.
2. Pick any note.
3. On every beat of the metronome find that note EVERYWHERE on the fretboard.
4. Increase the speed when it gets easy.
By learning and recognising the patterns we have looked at from the previous lessons you will be able to recall the notes faster.
E as an example
Notice the patterns:
- You can see all the octave patterns at work here and probably even more that you notice.
- E is an open string and also a 12th fret note.
- It is two frets higher (to the right) of the 5th fret D and open string D.
- There are actually only 2 of any note on one string.
Repeat daily until comfortable! As ever, take your time fully understanding all the concepts and patterns and then rinse and repeat. That is the only way to make sense of this. The benefits are huge.
Related Lessons
How To Find Any Note On The Bass Guitar
