Doctors HATE this ONE TRICK to Finally Improvise Over Anything

I am so unbelievably sick of internet guitar teachers charging students hundreds or thousands of dollars to give them the most arbitrary lesson structure they often can’t even execute themselves. But without a doubt, very high on that list, comes this illusive notion of ‘Mastery of the Fretboard’. I’ve played hundreds of gigs with dozens of artists and I can count on one hand the amount of times someone came up to me and said, “man, you really know the fretboard up and down!” But regardless, the internet wants to charge you hundreds of dollars to get to this magical, ambiguous goal that will finally be the key to fame and fortune. Well kids, I’m here to tell you the secret to playing over any chord, to playing any scale, to knowing exactly where you are on the fretboard at any time you’re playing. No you don’t have to buy my course, you don’t need to drill any scales four hours per day, you don’t even need to take a lesson with me. Ready?

Sight reading.

Show me any form of guitar practice that FORCES you to examine notes as notes, with minimal indication of placement on the fretboard, with zero familiar shapes or boxes to fall back on, that’s still musical and engaging. Typically once I say the words ‘sight reading’, my students’ eyes gloss over and roll back in their head. No one wants to be reminded of that boring stuff some classically trained teacher in elementary school told them to do. However you, dear listener, have a fundamental problem in your playing that you’re not addressing if you’re still stuck in your improvisational boxes and familiar patterns.

In order to increase profits and sell lesson material to more players, large scale instructional material producers started selling books of “tablature” and “soloing made easy” so that young guitarists would feel they had a more accessible path towards their goals. These methods, while inviting to young players, are ultimately short sighted and cause lasting issues down the line. They encourage young musicians to operate from a purely tactile relationship with their instrument with no underlying understanding of the music in front of them. Thousands of guitar players across the globe play their hands, not the notes, then don’t understand what’s going wrong. You will never find another instrument with quite the same level of disconnect and unfortunately it’s not slowing down, given the rise of YouTube guitar teachers.

When you rely exclusively on tabs, fretboard diagrams, or memorized fingerings, harmony becomes secondary to mechanics. You’re thinking in shapes instead of sounds, geometry instead of language. That’s why so you’re hitting a wall: you know what you want to say but have no words to say it, just syllables you’re hoping will fit together the right way.

I’ve had hundreds of students tell me they want to learn melodic minor, altered scales, or diminished harmony so they can “play over changes.” But when I ask them to spell an E♭ major scale, they pause. They’ve never built a direct relationship with notes themselves, they’ve never stopped to learn what they’re playing and why. Students waste hundreds of hours on mode patterns and runs they stole from someone online, but they can’t tell me a single good reason why it’s so important they master Lydian. It sounds fancy and validating to play these exotic sounding ideas, but external validation from musicians never sold millions of albums or connected to global audiences. You’ve built relationships with fingerings that happen to produce notes. That’s fundamentally backwards.

Sight reading flips that hierarchy. It forces you to confront music as information first and mechanics second. You start seeing intervals, chord tones, guide tones, voice leading, not frets. You begin recognizing that a line isn’t “pattern four starting on the 6th string,” it’s “9 → ♭3 → 5 resolving to the 3rd of the next chord.” You begin to understand why the writer made that choice and how you could bring that awareness to your writing and playing. It’s like reading a book for the first time and feeling filled with all this new verbiage and perspective you can bring to your own language.

There’s also a neurological shift that happens. When you read regularly, the distance between seeing a note and hearing it internally shrinks. Your ear strengthens, your reaction time improves. You stop hunting for notes and start anticipating them and playing into the changes is the difference between reacting to the harmony and commanding the harmony.

Sight reading is slow, it’s tedious, it’s like learning to read Arabic for the first time. But over weeks, months, years, all those little connections will build in your brain until there is no more gap between what you want to say and how you want to say it. My first goal with students is removing barriers to creative expression and unfortunately that sometimes means going back to basics to fill in the gaps we left for ourselves. Trust me, there’s no shortcut to mastery, but there are smarter ways to play your hand.

So there it is. Save your $500 on that online course, save hundreds in lessons if you have the discipline to do it on your own, but if you really want to walk onstage with the confidence that no matter what happens I can play over it, you must start sight reading.

Recommendations to start:

https://imslp.org/wiki/Violin_Partita_No.1_in_B_minor%2C_BWV_1002_(Bach%2C_Johann_Sebastian)

https://www.scribd.com/document/429790409/PARKER-Charlie-Omnibook-pdf

https://youtu.be/42AbTZNhlzg?si=G6aYD_7A5zIvLtg8 (If you can ignore the tabs underneath)

https://tedgreene.com/transcriptions/assets/Manha_De_Carnaval-TedGreene_TranscriptionByHak-YooLee.pdf (Grids can guide but don’t rely on them)