Hi David,
Thank you for writing your book. I really like your philosophy. Can you explain the difference between the IFR system and the CAGED system?
Thanks in advance,
Jon
David's response:
Hi Jon,
The CAGED system is a great step forward for beginning guitarists because it organizes the fretboard into five repeating patterns.
IFR takes this thinking one level deeper. In the same way that the CAGED drawings simplified the fretboard down to five patterns, IFR reduces these five patterns down to a single concept that can be visualized anywhere.
The reason we use this technique is because it gives us three important benefits:
- Learning the fretboard is much faster. In my video course Deep Foundations for Guitar, for example, you'll be soloing across the ENTIRE fretboard in any key by the fourth lesson. Think about that. All 12 major scales, all seven "modes" of each scale, with complete freedom of movement across the entire fretboard. How can it be possible to learn the entire fretboard in just four simple steps? This is the power of taking the time to understand what you're doing. This life-changing ability is available to anyone. All we need to do is take a moment to truly understand the fretboard, and then also take a moment to understand the major scale. With this approach, in literally four lessons you can master an ability that would take YEARS with memorized scale drawings.
- It greatly accelerates ear training and improvisation. One of the drawbacks to memorized scale drawings is that it's very difficult to maintain your awareness of where you are in the overall key of the music, because you begin seeing the scale drawing as just an empty physical shape. This is why so many beginning guitarists have such a hard time truly creating melodies when they improvise. Using the IFR tonal map you always know exactly where you are in the key of the music, and this awareness is 100% integrated with your ear.
- It prepares you for more advanced music. In many styles of music, the key of the music is constantly changing. And so there is no single scale drawing that will serve you for very long. What you really need is the ability to instantly visualize the notes of whatever new key that you're feeling now. In IFR, this is how we play all the time. So in IFR, improvising over tunes with constant key changes is just as easy as improvising in a single key the whole time.
If you like the CAGED system, you're going to love IFR. It contains the logic you already appreciate in CAGED but it turns this logic into a completely open system that you can visualize anywhere on the fretboard.
Thanks for the great question,
David
Master the fretboard with Deep Foundations for Guitar!
I teach this complete method in my video course Deep Foundations for Guitar. In this course, we start from the very beginning and build a complete approach to improvising on the guitar. You will learn to improvise freely across the entire fretboard, to express your own musical ideas in any key and to create a wide variety of chords and harmonic environments on the guitar. No prior knowledge of music theory or the IFR method is required. Everyone is welcome!