SING THE NUMBERS on daily walk

For me right now, the tonal shapes are helping me nail down the sound of the tonal map. I want to know the tonal map like I know the face of my spouse. Making progress. Not there yet.

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@hender99 has given a full answer & as he says, I’m sure that @ImproviseForReal would help too if you’re still unsure.

To me, they don’t get specific mention because they’re everywhere. They outline ‘thirds’ and ‘thirds’ are what chords are built out of. Stack two thirds together and you have a ‘triad’. Add another and you have a ‘seventh’ chord.

By using an exercise based on these shapes as a warm up I’m building up a feel for both movement & sound releationships that crop up over & over again in the rest of what I do.

Does that make sense?

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Yes it does. Thanks.

That was very interesting. Not easy, but at least a bit easier than I expected. However having watched the video again I decided to take David’s recommendation & go right back to the half step mobility exercise, with its stretch for the extra fret, for at least a few days. At first that felt more difficult than I felt it ought because I was uncomfortable with how I was ‘thinking’ the moves through the ‘dots’ in the tonal map that I’m now so used to. I seem to have solved that by counting/thinking of it as 71#2# > 34#5# > 6#71# > 2#34# > 5#6#7 > 1#2#3 then reversing 3b2b1 > 7b6b5 > etc.,

That pattern seems to be working for me.

N.B. I use P4 tuning, so I have the same ‘mobility jump’ all the way across.

An odd knock on of this practice (even just a couple of days) is that my fretboard shaped visualisation of the tonal map has moved!

Up to now it’s always been ‘over to the left, & a bit below centre’ (if that makes sense?), but now it’s moved to right in front of me, both when doing this exercise and when doing STN & FTN! I didn’t consciously move it, it just moved. What’s more it already ‘feels’ better (more natural) there. :slight_smile:

Strange how these things work. I guess it’s different for everyone, so YMMV, as they say.

@DavidW. I always thought that what we’re doing is changing our perception through daily practice. We’re moving things from our conscious control to our automatic subconscious… so we no longer think about what we’re doing and hearing, but just do it like we open and close our fist. It’s a process that takes time and persistence. Everyone’s mind is different, so different things will work better for some than for others.

I don’t think any of this is hard. Each little piece is pretty simple. The hard part for me is that I get impatient and want to rush ahead. And that’s when it all starts to fall apart and I get to back up several steps and go at it again.

Me too!

It can be hard to accept that SLOW is SURE (& in a curious way, the faster way to a fuller ability), but practice shows it sure is! :slight_smile:

Just today, prompted by going back to the basic mobility exercise as descirbed above I decided to step back to week 1 of STN/FTN too. I’m sure it was a useful exercise & I think I may hang around there for the rest of this week. It’s a nice comfy place & I’m still learning things there (that FTN track 03 especially is still a challenge - the faster, complex, sequences in it are still beyond any degree of certainty).

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