[SunnyDee]

Originally Posted by MC5C

Write out work sheets and play them on the guitar, randomly. Each sheet will have 6 rows on it, representing 6 strings (but in random order 4 - 2- 5- 6- 1- 3 for example) and two note names. Taking all 12 semitones, randomly assign two tones to each string - string 4, Ab, F#, string 2, E, G, and so on, until all 12 semitones are randomly placed on each string. Do a half dozen or more of these sheets (enough that you can't easily memorize or predict them), and each day grab one and blow through it as fast as you can, once only. It's a lot harder than you think.

I participated in a graduate student thesis study for a friend of mine, on specifically learning the fretboard. Every week for around 15 weeks we got an exercise to study, for exactly 10 minutes a day. One week it was CAGED, one week it was scale studies, and it worked through all of the popular methods published to learn the fretboard. Everyday we did one of those sheets with 6 rows and two notes per string as a test to see if we had learned anything or not. Nothing actually worked to improve our working knowledge of the fret, except doing the test, which wasn't part of the research since it wasn't a published practice method. My average was around 30 - 40 seconds, which was kind of low middle of the road. Serious university students of performance guitar were doing it in around 25 seconds. Several professional jazz guitarists with decades of experience did it in around 15 seconds.

This little quiz site works something like that. I found it helpful when I was learning the fretboard, especially because it's so customizable that I could even shift it to using lefty solfege which was super helpful for seeing the patterns of notes and chords of a scale as they apply to any key. https://www.musictheory.net/exercises/fretboard