I’m Jason Grimes. I play guitar.
I wrote the Fretboard Foundation book and run this site. I’ve been playing guitar and other instruments for over 30 years.
Creating improvised music in collaboration with others has become one of the great joys of my life. As I got better at it, I discovered that it’s mostly about listening intently and internalizing harmony. And over decades of study, I kept finding that most guitar instruction wasn’t helping me much with those things—in fact, it often seemed to get in the way.
I gradually developed some strong opinions about how guitar should be taught.
Music education should be about learning to create art and connect with people, in the most straightforward way possible.
Most approaches to teaching music haven’t changed much in over 200 years.
Back then, the only way to hear great music was to have musicians play note-for-note renditions of scores, written by a handful of composers who somehow had access to the mysterious creative process.
Music teaching was essentially about training human record players.
But today, it only takes a couple clicks on Spotify or YouTube to play almost any song at any moment. No need for human record players.
Today, the best reason to play music is to express ourselves creatively. To move others, and ourselves, and produce profound shared experiences. To create art, and to have fun.
It’s time for music to be taught differently.
Fretboard Foundation
I started by developing software tools to help learn some of these ideas, and I found them helpful.
Eventually I wrote the book Fretboard Foundation: Practical Building Blocks For Intermediate Guitarists. It’s comprehensive—I might even dare to say definitive—but it is a dense book. People wanted it broken down a bit more, and made a little more accessible.
So I started making videos, articles, courses, and giving in-person lessons. I built this site to collect and organize it all.
And now, here you are! Welcome. I hope it helps you become the kind of guitar player you want to be.
Talk to me
If you’re using the Fretboard Foundation method to learn or teach music, I would love to hear about your experience. Send me an email at [email protected].