Fretboard Mapping: Visualizing the Connected Fretboard
Navigating the guitar fretboard can be quite daunting. It’s a grid of notes that when taken at face value offers little insight into the nature of how it works. But if we drill down and start applying the basic structures of music to the guitar, interconnected shapes and patterns start to emerge that help you map out the fretboard. In this lesson we’re going to explore the relationship between scales, chords and arpeggios and how they form the connected fretboard.
Note that this lesson isn’t a deep dive into the specifics of the musical structures, there’s plenty of that information on the site already and I link to those resources throughout the lesson. If you need a guided approach to learning scales, chords, and arpeggios, Guitar Essentials: Foundational Fretboard Navigation has that covered with over 100 exercises to help you map out the fretboard.
Grid of Notes
On the surface, the guitar fretboard is just a grid of notes.
It’s important to learn these notes, but the notes alone don’t give us much to go on in terms of visualizing the fretboard in a way that allows us to navigate freely up and down the neck.
When we start applying musical structures to these notes, this changes. Because musical structures share a given intervallic formula (ie. all major scales share the same formula, etc), they can be applied across the fretboard to form the same structure from a different root note. This makes it easy to transpose from one key to another, one chord to another and so on.
Let’s peel back the layers of the fretboard starting with scales.
Mapping Scales to the Fretboard
In the hierarchy of musical structures, scales are at the top of the list. From scales we get triads, chords, and arpeggios. Within the grid of notes from above, we can extract scales. For instance, let’s look at the G major scale which contains the notes G, A , B, C , D, E and F#.
At this point it still seems messy, but if we look closer we can see distinct patterns that give us five unique scale shapes.
If we forgo the notes of the G major scale and look at it from a intervallic perspective, we get a formula that applies to all major scales.
The major scale formula is: Root, Major 2nd, Major 3rd, Perfect 4th, Perfect 5th, Major 6th and Major 7th. Applied to all five major scale shapes gives us the following:
With this formula we can create any major scale using any of these five shapes by simply changing the root note in which the pattern is based. For example, if we take the first G major scale shape and move it up two frets so the lowest root is on fret 5 of the 6th string, we get the A major scale. Move it up three more frets and we the C major scale.
Although we’re using the major scale as the example here, these patterns are shared between major and minor scales, or relative scales. Relative scales share the same notes, but not the same root note. Because of this, the interval qualities are different, creating the major/minor tonality.
Pentatonic Scales
Within the 7-note major and natural minor scale are the pentatonic scales. These 5-note scales are the driving force behind many of the most iconic guitar solos in rock history. Just like their 7-note parent scales, pentatonic scales can be grouped into five unique shapes that connect up and down the fretboard.
As with the 7-note major and minor scales, the relative major/minor pentatonic scales share these five scale shapes, but differ in interval qualities.
Likewise, the pentatonic patterns are also movable up and down the fretboard.
Mapping Arpeggios to the Fretboard
If we dig into the G major pentatonic scale and retain only the chord tones from the G major chord, we get five distinct arpeggio patterns.
Both major and minor arpeggio shapes are also movable, meaning they can be applied to any root note. The same can be done with the minor pentatonic to get the minor arpeggio shapes. Being that these arpeggios are built from chord tones, it should be obvious that we can pull out the associated chord forms as well, as we’ll see next.
Mapping Chords to the Fretboard
Chords are groups of notes that are sounded together and form the backbone of any song. On the guitar, the open chords can be used for the basis of five distinct chord shapes, known as the CAGED system.
The CAGED system is an extremely powerful way to lay out the guitar fretboard and can be related back to arpeggios, pentatonic and diatonic scales. In other words, instead of seeing the first shape of the of the major scale as shape 1 (or position 1, or pattern 1, etc), it can be viewed through the lens of the CAGED system as the E form scale shape.
To me, the CAGED system is absolutely essential to learning the guitar fretboard. It can be used for major chords as well as minor chords.
Now we can turn to the building blocks of chords, triads.
Triads
The foundation of chords are triads, which are 3-note structures formed by stacking 3rds from a given scale. Triads are an essential part of navigating the fretboard and play an important role when soloing or improvising over a chord progression.
Triads can be formed across four string groupings and for each string grouping you’ll have three voicings (root position, first position, and second position) forming three unique shapes for each string grouping.
Below we can see triads on strings 1, 2, and 3 as well as strings 2, 3, and 4.
A good way to learn them is by applying them to chord scales.
The Connected Fretboard
Putting it all together, we can visualize a fretboard where scales, arpeggios, and chords are all connected.
Viewing the fretboard in this manner allows you to more easily navigate and effective use each of these structures in your playing. Understanding that a chord you’re playing is directly connected to a pentatonic scale or arpeggio gives you the freedom to easily incorporate lead lines and melodies on top of those chords and expand those lines into full solos over a chord progression.
Wrap up
In this lesson we looked at the relationship between scales, arpeggios and chords that share the same root note. Being able to connect the chord to a scale or arpeggio and easily move between them is immensely powerful when it comes to mapping the fretboard. Again, for a guided approach to learning the CAGED system chords, scales, arpeggios and triads, check out Guitar Essentials: Foundational Fretboard Navigation.
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