Hey, happy Braille Day!
That’s right, today is Braille Day, so I thought it would be appropriate to talk about how to play the guitar without looking!
There are plenty of good blind guitar players of course, but ironically most guitar players who are not blind still find themselves wishing they could play without looking!
A certain amount of that simply comes from practice, and the muscle memory that comes from having played a lot.
However, there are some things you can do to greatly enhance your ability to play without looking. For instance, learning a scale pattern really well goes a LONG way.
Take the pentatonic minor pattern for instance. In the key of A minor, you’re starting at the 5th fret. If you assign one finger to each fret you need in that pattern, your first finger is on the 5th fret, and your fourth finger on the 8th fret. Now you can play two octaves of that scale without ever having to move your hand up or down the fretboard…
Each finger stays assigned to a single fret!
With a little practice, it’s not long before you don’t have to look at every note anymore.
There are three essential scale patterns that I believe every guitar player needs to know, in order to be able to play anywhere on the fretboard in any key. You can learn those three scale patterns starting here.