Perhaps you are thinking about playing a musical instrument or it’s something you think you’d like to do but haven’t got the time. Or perhaps you’re a seasoned musician.

Whatever it is, when your a guitarist, at some point in time you have to get to grips with the fretboard.

At first you look upon it, this collection of six strings hoisted across a fretted neck and it makes no sense at all. Then you are shown your first set of chords, normally all in the open position with bizarre and unnatural finger positions…

This is when most people quit.

I picked up my first guitar in 1999 without a clue of what I’m doing. The online scene was in its infancy and I didn’t have a stable connection. I took a couple of lessons from a teacher that looked more bored than anything else and then I quit.

During my younger years I was given a full suite aptitude test and while I scored high in intellectual activities, my dexterity was measured at abysmal. A little bit lower than abysmal, actually.

I felt like a retard at doing anything intricate and the test proved it to me.

However I knew deep down that I had some musical affinity. I felt I could hear things others did not and the music spoke to me. There was some kind of transference other than enjoyment. It was a language from another dimension, in another plane of existence entirely.

So I tired many, many instruments. The harmonica being a notable one. I could play that thing without thinking but it felt limited. Like I wanted to say more.

It was only after I picked up the guitar that I truly felt complete. It’s blend of melody and harmony, it’s sheer expressive value both acoustic and electronically. It was unmatchable.

It’s the instrument that would allow me to speak and to sing. Quite literally.

The only problem being that dexterity thing. Cause all things equal, The Vikid Truth is a klutz.

Anyway, I persevered and pushed. Then I pushed a little bit more and before I knew it, I had seriously injured myself trying to play barre chords.

My index finger hurt like hell every time I picked up the instrument and eventually I was forced to quit.

And so it remained for a a good 15 years. I didn’t play. I tried other things. Different kinds of flutes, percussion, wood wind, trumpets and more, but nothing stuck.

Till I picked up the guitar again. This time my fingers had recovered a little and I was very careful each time I played. The mind’s eye always watching for discomfort and stopping when it reared its ugly head.

So progress was a little slow. But the joy wasn’t. No matter how badly I played, to me, I sounded like James Taylor. To me, I was my own Johnny Cash. Hell with what anybody else thinks.

Still the fretboard was a mystery. I couldn’t get out of the cowboy chords and any thing up the fretboard might as well have been written in Japanese.

That is until I decided to learn the notes. All the notes.

That 12 x 6 = 72 notes. Closer to a 120 if you go further up the fretboard.

I wasn’t really sure why I was doing it. But I used a technique similar to the one posted below in this video:

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And everything started to change.

Things started to connect. I could now see what people like John Mayer or Slash were actually doing. And in my own kutzy and discoordinated way, I could do the same.

I started to see the modes and the shapes. To understand where the scales were coming from and how harmony was constructed.

In short, I started to be able to read the instrument and the instrument started reading me.

That feeling of being one…

It’s pure joy and requires nothing much more than you, a wooden box and set of steel strings.

Forget all the gurus… the endless books, podcasts and videos. Forget the advice, the billions of $$$‘s that is the Self Help and Spiritual Industry. Forget Wim Hoff Breathing and ridiculous Asanas.

The Truth, the very Vikid Truth, lies here.

Become your own Superhero.

And that’s,