Your biggest 'aha' moment when everything made sense in learning guitar / fret-board?

[Cas-v86]

What was the moment where everything just clicked and from where you really got to understand the theory, fretboard, instrument as a whole and developed a skill in say improv? Was it CAGED, was it scales? Let me hear yours!

[Mark L]

1) the notes are all there, and
2) they lie perfectly between the octaves.

[Steel and wood]

Barre chords and scale patterns opened up the fret board for me. (I discovered the fretboard is just patterns of notes up and down and across the fretboard).

[Mr. Jelly]

I learned guitar before learning tools like CAGED came about. I had to make my own by trial and error. So the biggest thing for me to understand that set me on my path to eventually learn more and more was how the I - IV - V worked. It became a way I could make pleasant noise, at least to me, while trying to figure more out. It kind of tied everything together.

[srick]

• Licks build on licks.
• Licks build off of chords.
• Chords can be extended by changing one finger.

What I mean by this is: licks are segments of a scale. Licks are usually movable (as they are patterns), and for me, licks are the key to learning the fretboard.

Chords can be extended and by moving one finger, you can make a chord a 6 chord, a 7 chord, etc.

Like bits and pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, the fretboard comes together. You start with that basic chord shape (that you learned via the CAGED system), then start playing around with it via licks and extensions, and voila!

(but that's just the start... now lets talk about rhythm )

[rokdog49]

Learning all the complete basic chord shapes and where the scales reside within each.
Once I got that, it was simply a matter of "seeing" those scales within a I, IV, V progression anywhere on the guitar. After that, connecting those scales and playing double stops and arpeggios followed.
I'm still learning all that but thanks to a great instructor, I'm light years ahead of where I was even a year ago.

[FwL]

For me it was learning the notes on the fingerboard.

I knew the notes up and down the E and A strings from playing lots of rock power chords, but the rest was a mystery to me. At one point I thought it would be a good idea to make a chart of all the notes on the fingerboard and have it where I could reference it whenever I needed to know what note I was playing. By the time I finished making the chart I realized that I didn't need it anymore.

Once I could see the notes on the fingerboard, everything else started to fall into place, especially chord inversions.

.

[JonPR]

I don't remember any huge revelations of that order.
A small one I do remember, back when I was still struggling with the big F barre, was that you could play an F chord like this:

-(5)- (fret or mute with index)
--6-- middle
--5-- index
--7-- ring
--8-- pinky
--x--

Wow, I thought - that's much easier!

You can also see that as a dawning realisation of the CAGED system (F chord with "C" shape) - which I proceeded to work out for myself before knowing it was a "system".

One much later one was realising jazz chord-scale theory was a big "emperor's new clothes" thing. The revelation was - hey, the way I've been playing has been OK all along! Nothing to see here!

[Pitar]

My biggest a-ah moment came well before I first picked up a guitar. It was the moment I knew I wanted to learn to play it. That came in 68 when Mason Williams debuted Classical Gas.

After that, there were no remarkable spikes in the learning curve that I remember.

[rick-slo]

Never been a "moment" when every thing just clicked. If you have a "moment" I could be you have decided for better or worse that you are comfortable with whatever current level, or perhaps rut, you are in. It's a continual process of developing technical and musical aptitudes (they do not necessarily progress hand in hand). It's also possible to regress.

[Howard Klepper]

When I realized that there are only 12 notes and 7 of them are in any scale, so the odds are well in my favor.

The next was when I figured out that I could apply the "SAT Rule": When in doubt, pick C.

[Nymuso]

When I was looking at that crazy Eb chord and realized it was just a C chord barred on the third fret. That was my Rosetta Stone that unlocked all the secrets of the fretboard. Well, most of them.

[MC5C]

If there was an "ah-ha" moment it was probably when I realized that all the distracting, confusing scale patterns that I was trying to work with were actually all one pattern that was everywhere on the fretboard and all the notes were part of it. So I threw away all of the CAGED type systems and just played the guitar. Way easier. I still think in key centers, though.

[Stratcat77]

I've had lots of "a-ha" moments in my 40+ years of playing guitar. And honestly, many of them came in the last 10 years as I spent more time sitting down and really thinking about what was happening as I played vs just jamming and learning songs. One example was when I realized that all of the notes in the standard chords in a key are made up of notes from that major scale. How in the world had I played for 30 years and not known that? Maybe because I never had lessons. Much of what I played in rock bands was simpler than some of the stuff I'm doing now (Bad Co vs James Taylor). And most of the lead work I did in bands was using the same couple of pentatonic boxes and getting interesting sounds with techniques like bending, hammer-ons, etc. Just in the last few years since I switched to 100% acoustic, it's forced me to play differently and I've learned a lot. I've since gotten much more familiar with playing all over the neck out of necessity because I can't do the same bends and utilize sustain the same way, etc. And I've learned to use a lot more chord voicings all over the neck. I still absolutely love it when I do have an a-ha moment. It still happens. I think if I'd had lessons earlier on, I'd probably have had fewer a-ha moments!!

[tonyo]

For me it was connecting 2 of the CAGED patterns. When I noodled on a single pattern along to a backing track it was fun but unimpressive. When I realized that each adjacent pattern connects to the patterns above and below it, the light went off.