Guitar Fluency

What is guitar fluency?

In any domain, fluency means the ability to express oneself effortlessly, without thinking of rules or mechanics.

Fluency on guitar is the ability to play what we hear in our imagination. Directing our fingers by imagining the sound, not by thinking about notes and technique, and not by aping memorized patterns and licks. It means letting our ear drive the machine. Or, to paraphrase guitar virtuoso Joe Pass, "We want to play the guitar. We don't want the guitar to play us."

A fluent speaker doesn't think about grammar or mentally translate from another language, the words just emerge from the thoughts. A fluent writer doesn't think about how to form each letter, they think the word and it appears on the page. A fluent guitarist doesn't think about which fret to press or which chord comes next, the music in the mind's ear flows out through the hands.

Zooming in and out

Fluency is not an all-or-nothing state. Even when playing fluently, we constantly zoom in and out across different levels of awareness, mostly without noticing. What's the next chord? Which chord shape? Where's the root? Where's the pentatonic over that? These flickers of conscious orientation happen in split seconds, almost automatically, and then we settle back into being directed by the mind's ear.

It's similar to the way many of us can drive a car mostly on autopilot, directed by our sense of where we want to go. But occasionally we might think "What street am I looking for? Main Street. There's the sign" before settling back into the flow. Fluency doesn't mean never thinking consciously; it means conscious thought is a brief flash of orientation rather than a constant effort, and we shift between levels of detail as naturally as shifting our gaze.

The knowledge and technique don't disappear. They become invisible, like grammar to a fluent speaker. When we need them, we recall them quickly, and let them go just as fast.

How fluency develops

Given a long enough time and a dedicated enough effort, fluency is bound to develop. It's the natural way our brains and nervous systems grow and adapt to repeated experiences. This is the way most fluent guitarists got there. Not by having the most brilliant teacher or the most useful methods, but just by doing it obsessively for so long that the necessary structures eventually grew in their brains and bodies.

But relying on this natural development can take a very long time and tremendous commitment, and most people give up long before they get there. The goal of Fretboard Foundation is to dramatically shorten that journey and make fluency accessible to almost everyone, by identifying the essential skills, breaking them into the smallest learnable chunks, and practicing them in efficient and accessible ways.

Who can achieve fluency?

Many guitarists see such fluency as a nearly impossible dream, attainable only by virtuosos and geniuses, or at least only after many, many years of obsessive study and practice.

But think about it like this: Who can become fluent in their native language? Who can learn to read and write? Who can learn to shoot a basketball? These skills are at least as complicated as guitar fluency; they involve intricate fine motor skills and musculature, complex rules of grammar and geometry. But small children do these things routinely, and almost all adults can learn them with a reasonable amount of effort.

Nearly anyone can become fluent on guitar, and in about the same amount of time, if they actually aim for it and practice in effective ways.

Why don't most guitarists develop fluency?

As mentioned earlier, most guitarists give up long before fluency is achieved. But they were doomed before that. Most were never even aiming for fluency in the first place.

In part because fluency seems unlikely to be achieved, and in part because of long-standing (and now obsolete) traditions, most guitarists and guitar teachers aim for competency instead.

Competency vs. fluency

Competency focuses on accuracy, a large vocabulary, and the ability to express complex ideas correctly.

Fluency describes how comfortably and quickly we express ourselves, often allowing for minor errors if the message is understood. It is about flow and communication efficiency, rather than the mechanical precision and perfection of competency.

The way we've always done it

Around 150 years ago, up until the era of radio and recorded music, being a musician was a good professional occupation. Music education was a vocational training, undertaken in order to get a well-paying, high-status job in an orchestra or ensemble. Musicians were expected to be competent performers of a composer's work, not to fluently express their own ideas.

Times have changed, but music education really hasn't. Sure, some guitar teachers use YouTube now, but most still employ essentially the same methods with the same objectives as music education 100 years ago. Because that's how they were taught.

Now there are better ways

Now that recorded music has displaced the professional musician's role as essentially a human record player, fluency is a much more sensible goal than competency. They aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but if we aim for fluency we are going to study things in a very different way.

We can focus from the beginning on the sounds in our mind that we want to produce on the instrument, and let that guide our practice, rather than the extent to which we have perfectly reproduced the nuance of some composer's score. We can judge for ourselves, immediately, whether we've played what we intended, and can adjust for ourselves until it sounds right. And then we can play that over and over until we can get it right every time. Essentially inventing our own exercises as we go along to suit our own creative expression, rather than robotically trying to copy what someone else told us to do.

There is still an important role for teachers in this approach. They can save us a lot of time by pointing out technical issues that would otherwise give us trouble in the future. And recent decades have seen an explosion of research in fields like learning theory, neuroscience, physiology, and pedagogy into the fastest and most effective ways to acquire new skills. These findings are only recently beginning to filter into general awareness, and new methods and tools are being created to take advantage of them.

Fluency is just the beginning

Developing fluency on guitar is not the end goal. It's the starting line. It's table stakes. We must develop fluency in order to express ourselves. But what are we going to say?

Once we are fluent in a language, we are able to express any fool thought that pops into our head. But that doesn't mean we are worth listening to.

At that point, we need to develop our ideas. We need to have experiences, and learn from them. We need to contemplate the ideas of others, and have our own opinions about them, our own take on things. And we need to practice expressing those ideas, and refine them, over the course of the rest of our lives. Fluency is the capability that makes all this possible.

Aim for fluency

Fluency is within your reach. But you have to believe that, and you have to aim for it. And you still have to do some work. See The Right Way to Learn Guitar to learn more about how to get there.