When I first started, one of the most intriguing things about playing the guitar was how quickly and effortlessly experienced players could pick out the melody in a song and play it back. Since this seemed like such a supernatural talent, I couldn’t help but want to understand how it works and master it for myself. A year or two into learning to play guitar, I tried learning the melody of one of my favorite songs by pausing the song after each note, finding the note on the fretboard, and then writing it down on a sheet a paper to try to write out the whole melody. As you can imagine this was an arduous process, and I quickly lost interest in it. It took a long time to develop the foundational skills to be able to try this again, but eventually I got to a place where I can find a good starting point on the fretboard, and piece the notes of the melody together. There is no right answer for how to figure this out, but I wanted to retrace my steps of how I got there.

The very first thing I did was learn the major scale up, down, and across the fretboard. When I first started, I knew the minor Pentatonic scale, and I could play one octave of the major scale. This is a great baseline, but this doesn’t give you enough notes to be able to play a lot of melodies. The way I learned the scales on the fretboard was memorizing the 5 different positions of the scales as shown here in this article on the Guitar Habits website. I spent a lot of time practicing each shape until I had them down.

After memorizing the 5 positions in G, I began practicing them in different keys. This doesn’t seem like a difficult task when you’re shifting the shapes one whole step to play in A, but it really tests your knowledge when you have to shift the patterns 5 half-steps to play them in C. There is a wrap-around effect with the 5 Postions, where a position that you’re playing towards the bottom of the fretboard for one key, becomes one of the positions on the top of the fretboard for another key. It’s something you have to get comfortable with, and playing the positions in all the different keys helps you get accustomed to it. Once I felt confident in playing the positions in different keys, I worked to chain them all together. I would start at the top of the fretboard, and work my way down playing all the positions.

Eventually I began to look at the fretboard differently. Instead of thinking of these 5 different shapes, which span a few frets and go all the way across the fretboard, I started to think of each string as having its own scale. Looking back on it now, this is essentially (in my opinion), what the 5 positions are doing, but I didn’t marry these two ideas together at the time. What I started doing was taking a key like C, and playing one octave of the major scale on the C note of every string. Once that was easy, I started playing two octaves, and then playing it backwards. This exercise was tremendously helpful, not only for getting more comfortable with the scales, but it also allowed me to see how that fit into the 5 positions I had memorized, and I was able to find notes on the fretboard much faster.

Once I got the mechanics of things down, I wanted to start working on finding the right notes within the shapes I had learned. I put a radio station on, and I would try to pick out a couple distinct notes in the melody of the song and find them in the shape I was most comfortable with, which is referred to as “Position 5” (also the Pentatonic shape). From there I could usually fumble around the shapes I knew and find more notes that belonged in the melody. I couldn’t do this very quickly or play it through very many times, but I was starting to get it. I was practicing this a lot, and I was getting better at it, but forcing all the melodies into Postition 5 was very limiting and sometimes confused me more when I couldn’t clearly see the notes within the shapes I memorized. I started to push myself out of that shape, and tried to find the starting point of the melodies in a different place on the fretboard.

I would listen to the note I wanted to play, and then take a guess at roughly where I would find it. I tried a couple notes until I found the one I wanted. After finding the starting point, I would think about the note I wanted to play next and try to figure out roughly “how far away it was from the starting point”. This is interval training, and it’s really, really important. It is the secret sauce of how to pick up melodies and play them back. Over time this got a lot easier, you start to learn how the different intervals sound and where they are on the fretboard. You also start to learn how to find the notes in different places, instead of just within one or two shapes. This was really the key to unlocking the fretboard for me. I could see how to play the same melody in countless ways, and I immediately felt like I had a lot of choices, instead of being confined to a single shape.

I’m continuing to practice picking out the melodies and playing them back in time, but I do feel like I understand what’s behind the curtain, and this has been a fascinating skill to unpack.