Thanks! I used to worry that learning how the music work would kill the “magic” for me, but I’ve found it to be quite the opposite. It has heightened my understanding and enjoyment, and just made me realize the “magic” is much more in the expression than in the mechanics of it all. Cheers! 🎸🧪🤘

Maybe I should stick to an exponentially-expanding release schedule to build up that sense of satisfaction when they drop 🤣

​@@fretscienceNO please dont lol

Thanks for your kind words! As a science nerd, I’m a big fan of being able to “derive from first principles” even if you won’t do that live while you’re playing. Whenever I am uncertain about a fingering, I like to be able to take a moment and figure it out on the fretboard rather than look up a diagram somewhere.

"So much more convenient to be able to play and think about what you're doing than having to remember what you've learned." I just wanna say that I love this statement. I think that it concisely states the reason behind learning any music theory - and provides a perfect response to the "why learn theory anyway" question that is debated so constantly on the Internet. Well said.

@@fredhughes4115It also delineates the difference between a creative artist living in God's grace and a blind atheist riff-copying robot living in Hell's kitchen.

Glad it helped! 🎸🧪🤘

Your kind words are much appreciated! 🎸🧪🤘

I think you are missing the point of the criticism. The title is "decoder ring" implies a shortcut to getting where you need to go. But the video is the opposite in terms of content. For example, there is really no need to calculate semi tones on a guitar. Instead, you just memorize the shape, which is where the video finally goes anyway. Said another way, rather than go a b c d, you can just go a d. Adding steps you don't need, overcomplicates the ideas. However, I agree that a discussion of where intervals comes from is important to understand what is happening, but the video does not distinguish between what you should understand (and not do), and what you should just do to get where you need to be. I like the depth of the video, and I think it's a great video. However, as a "decoder" it isn't very functional as a way to really play guitar. The title should be, "intervals, what's really happening when you play the patterns you already know."

Glad it was helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks, Francis…it makes my day when my ideas connect with experienced teachers! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for the kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

A lot of this, I only recently figured out for myself 😅

Thanks, that’s practically my mission statement 🤣🎸🧪🤘

To be fair, I only just figured out the counting trick a couple of months ago 🤣 Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you’re finding it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

I’ve followed Jon’s guitar playing since the early 90s and even hosted his first unofficial webpage back circa ‘94. His advanced improvisation book was a revelation for me. I hope he’s recovering well from his recent bout with COVID.

Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad they’re clicking for you! 🎸🧪🤘

That’s fantastic to hear…thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

That’s great to hear! 🎸🧪🤘

Much appreciated, thanks! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks! It’s not something I use every day, but I think it’s a worthwhile mental model to have in your bag of tricks. 🎸🧪🤘

You also learn a lot faster when you understand what (and why) you’re learning

🤣🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

Much appreciated…cheers! 🎸🧪🤘

For practicing intervals in jazz chord progressions, I also highly recommend checking out Tom Quayle’s “Solo” app 🎸🧪🤘

Most welcome 😊🎸🧪🤘

Much appreciated, thanks! 🎸🧪🤘

I shortened it from Jon Finn’s “warp refraction threshold” 🎸🧪🤘

I’ve never seen it anywhere else…I just hope you find it useful! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks…I tend to get excited about these topics and try to jam in a ton of information into every video. They’re aimed at intermediate players who already know some basics, and I’m trying to help those players see things in a new-and more powerful-way. So it definitely can end up being too much for some viewers. I’m glad you found some value in it! 🎸🧪🤘

Much appreciated, thanks! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad it helped! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks! 🎸🧪🤘

I’m glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

@@fretscience 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks, Paul! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks, glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you liked it! 🎸🧪🤘

I’m glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks, Charles! 🎸🧪🤘

I definitely agree about moving in octaves. The other intervals (and their complements) are more useful for finding chord and scale tones, but I totally agree that learning them as complementary pairs is a great approach 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your support! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks…I’m always looking for ways to make the explanations more clear. 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

Not quite as painful as waiting for a new Extreme album, but ... oh, hey! 🎸🧪🤘

@@fretscience hahaha!

Glad it helped…makes the production time worth it 😉🎸🧪🤘

🤣🎸🧪🤘

Glad you found it…hope it helps! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

I played for over 30 years before I learned the notes on the upper strings, and doing it even after all those years has made a massive positive difference in my understanding and approach to the guitar 🎸🧪🤘

@@fretscience That's great to hear FS. By upper, I assume you mean the top 3 thicker strings. I am doing online lessons with Brian from Zombie Guitar. He is also excellent. This is a 12-week program shere he has us learning the triads staring with C Major, then C Minor (all the way up to B- so every note.) It's a brilliant system and it will lend itself well to playing arpeggios and not memorizing, but knowing immediately where we are on the guitar. You learn one Major and the Minor chord per week. In 12 weeks you own them all- and the triads. Honestly, after really digging into the C Major chord, I am already starting to see, feel and hear the intervals. As both you and he says, you start to recognize the intervals and patterns. Even now, if I land on an off, almost blue note, it's fine. I can hear if I am sharp or flat and slide up or down to get where I need to be. With all the free videos available, most people do a very shallow dive on basic guitar concepts but rarely dig in. They jump into playing songs way to fast. When I first played drums, I thought my instructor was going to sit me down at a huge drum set. He did not. I was faced with an old, dirty Remo drum pad. We drilled the basics for months. For me, theory and really understanding what I am doing is the way to go. Anyone can memorize roughly how songs go- mechanically where to put your fingers, but playing guitar takes a much deeper level of understanding. You can design your own unique sounds. It's the difference between being a construction worker or mechanic vs. being an Engineer. Both are fine, and I enjoy swinging a hammer and turning wrenches however I also enjoy designing and building my own unique things. Thanks again for the brilliant lesson! Subscribed! I look forward to learning more.

Glad you liked it! 🎸🧪🤘

If you can think of a way to explain it more clearly than I did in the video, please let me know. I struggled to convey how to think about the “negative numbers” in this method, and there’s probably a better way to explain it. As Barbie used to say: “math is hard” 🤣

​@@fretscience Haha I love it, thanks for the reply! Your videos are concise and pretty well thought out. I found the whole thing - other than this part - very easy. Last night I left more than several comments inquiring about it, but I deleted them all out of embarrassment once I felt I got a grasp of what you were saying. Granted, I can be verbose, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But... since you asked! At 9:19 you say, "We have to add twelve to get into the valid range of intervals..." First off, my brain was fairly broken here, because just looking at the shape, I could clearly see that this is a minor 6th having memorized guitar interval shapes on the fretboard... So when you say we "have to" add 12 to get into the valid range of intervals, I was already thrown off, because I even played the shape twice to hear it and confirm, "Wait, that's a minor 6th..." I checked more than a few times because of the comment, "and then we see that the second note is a major third above the first note." This really had me struggling too... I think using the words, "have to" was a big part of the confusion... Especially when you then go on to say, "and then we see that the second note is a major third above the first note..." This part just didn't make sense to me for a while. It's particularly confusing because there's two notes on the screen, and the note you're referring to here, a D which is an octave above the D in the video... isn't on the screen... That would have really helped a lot... I felt like I was going crazy... Counting back and forth on piano rolls and on my guitar... I think a different way of explaining that would have made more sense to me would be to say, "Now that we see -8, we can see that the interval is a minor sixth" -- especially because this guitar shape front and back all day long is a minor 6th! -- "But, hey, remember when talked about complimentary intervals before? Two different ways of getting to the same note? Now, what we can do if we want to is take the number of half steps here, which is -8, and add it to 12... This would give us 4, which gives us a major 3rd... Which is a complimentary, or inverted interval.... So now, we know that the distance between these two notes here is a minor sixth, but if we wanted to add another D and make sure it's complimentary in relation to the A#, or first note, we know how to invert it, and what interval is required to make that jump happen..." This is at the heart of why I don't necessarily see the value of the negative numbers in this example particularly... The rest was wildly useful, but this was so confusing for me! then when you go on to discuss the system in relation to root notes with negative numbers all of a sudden it made more sense to be able to tell quickly what the functional harmony is doing... So maybe this section could have gone later, or with some language referring to it as optional yaddah yaddah yaddah... Anyhow, as you can see, I can be really verbose, and I'm sure this could be cut down a lot... Even reading what I wrote out, I wonder if I'm missing something... Or if I simply didn't understand a concept, but I'm actually fairly confident I do at this point. Anyway, thanks again for the great video... Very informative and useful trick to see what's going on on the guitar better. I memorized/ trained my ear a fair amount last year, but after realizing I didn't have the amount of half-steps per interval memorized, and that I couldn't recognize them on the guitar, I realized that my ear training only got me so far... And that to be able to functionally compose better I'd need to re-study a few concepts that I hadn't quite glossed over but also hadn't quite drilled into memory enough to make them really useful... So yeah, that's really the only criticism of this video I find to be wildly helpful! (I also bought your worksheet for this to help clear up some of the confusion).... Would be to clarify/re-word or put this part later, and/or also put in a little filler at the beginning for people that might not have gone too deep into intervals to give them a heads up on some other things that they might want to do before/after this lesson to inform them on WHY we're doing this, "Knowing the intervals can be an integral part of composing, and making sure that you can get out what's in your head accurately. Identifying them quickly and easily on the guitar can be a great way of doing this. In this video we're going to cover a system to be able to help accommodate that, but, in case this is something you don't know much about, I'd recommend searching for some videos or tutorials on ear training before or after this video so that you can know what to do with them...." Yaddah yaddah yaddah re-word it... Haha anyway, thanks again for the great info.

I’m glad it was helpful overall, in spite of the confusion on this one point. I’m always looking for ways to explain things more clearly, and I definitely appreciate your feedback! 🎸🧪🤘

@@fretscience Of course! My last and only inquiry is - by reading my comment - do you feel I'm missing anything? I think I get it pretty well, but I'm dying to know - still there's some weird part of me that feels like I'm missing something despite having fought for an understanding of it - and super appreciative of the response!

It’s hard to tell for sure without having a real-time conversation, but I think you get it. Those two notes played on their own as a chord in isolation definitely sound like an m6. In the context of a chord where the upper note is the root, the lower note is the M3. Those two intervals are complements, so one going up reaches the same note name as the other going down and vice versa. If that fits your understanding, you’re good!

Glad it helped! 🎸🧪🤘

Us amoebas (amoebi?) gotta stick together

Much appreciated, thanks! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words and your support! The book is on the back burner until I finish a handful of videos that I’m really excited about, but hopefully by the end of 2024.

​​@@fretscienceThanks again, Keith! I just bought your wonderful PDF bundle and am looking forward to diligently digesting it and your videos, including the upcoming ones. All the best!!!

@@iggykarpov Much appreciated, thanks!

@@fretscience I am thrilled I have found your great work. Thank you!!!

Is there a “❤️❤️❤️” button for comments somewhere? 🎸🧪🤘

Thank you! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad it helped! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

🤯🎸🧪🤘

For what it’s worth, my videos are aimed at intermediate or advanced-beginner players. I try to include all of the information needed to understand the concept, but I do move quickly. 🤔

@@fretscience The pace is acceptable since we can pause and rewind easily on KZfaq. I feel like; naturally, many guitarists “feel” and somewhat understand intervals over time, and the explanations and diagrams in the video help put a map to what’s in people’s heads. I'm excited to see what you have in store for 2024.

🤣🎸🧪🤘

Oh yeah but dig that so, subscribed.

Glad you’re here! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

Thanks for your kind words! 🎸🧪🤘

That’s very kind of you to say 🎸🧪🤘

Glad it was helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

I’m aiming to blow minds of intermediate players while being fairly accessible to beginners and occasionally giving a-ha moments to pros. The jury’s still out on how well I’m succeeding, but there’s more to come 🤣🎸🧪🤘

The beauty of KZfaq is you can rewatch whichever parts you need to…and of course my cheat sheets are also a great way to refresh your memory 😉🎸🧪🤘

Thanks! The cheat sheet already covers P4 pretty well…you can just ignore the discussion of the warp and the diagrams where the shape straddles it. 2 for the price of 1! 🎸🧪🤘

It works for 8 string guitar too - why limit yourself? 🤣🎸🧪🤘

@@fretscience haha I was certainly considering an 8 string but I want to double my 5 string bass on recordings so the low B is all I need. Until the GAS kicks in I suppose!

Glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad to have you here! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you found it helpful! 🎸🧪🤘

My pleasure! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you liked it! 🎸🧪🤘

Glad you’re here! 🎸🧪🤘

I tried to keep the math to middle-school level, but yes, there are lots of opportunities to use mod 12 and mod 7 in music theory! 🤣🎸🧪🤘

Glad you enjoyed it! 🎸🧪🤘

I would definitely agree that enharmonic naming distinctions matter to those who write music and share it in standard notation, and to fluent readers. But for the vast majority of guitar players, I think it’s a subtlety they can safely ignore. I’m “classically trained” (as an amateur woodwind player), enough to get it correct most of the time, so hopefully you won’t find too many mistakes in my videos.

My hope is that it’s all there in the videos, but feel free to ask questions about whatever you’re finding confusing 🎸🧪🤘

Understanding the “warp” is the secret. It’s a little tricky to use at first, but it becomes second nature fairly quickly. I hope it helps! 🎸🧪🤘

Cheers! 🎸🧪🤘

Thank you! 🎸🧪🤘

I’ve never seen a demonstration of how negative harmony is useful in practice. It’s a bit too esoteric for this channel!