Most guitar exercises can be adjusted to your ability, but this one can't. It comes with an expiry date. As your fretboard knowledge and your ear get better, you won't be able to do it any more, because you'll very quickly work out where you are.
So if you're a beginner or intermediate player, still learning the fretboard and still developing your ear, this is the perfect time to do it. You don't need to know a single scale. It's all about musicality and getting to know the neck.
What is guitar Minesweeper? ▶ 0:44
I call it guitar Minesweeper, because that's pretty much what it is. You feel your way around a small patch of the fretboard, find the notes that are safe, and build out from there.
If you're stuck in the first minor pentatonic position, maybe going a little bit backwards or forwards from it, this is a great way to break out of that box. It puts you in uncharted territory straight away.
How the exercise works ▶ 1:14
- Pick a backing track, or ideally a shuffled playlist of backing tracks, so you don't know what key you're in.
- Pick a four-fret range anywhere on the fretboard. Frets 2, 3, 4 and 5, for example, or 10, 11, 12 and 13. It doesn't matter where.
- Play along and use your ear to find the notes in that range that work.
- From there, start improvising with only those notes.
For some of you that might sound terrifying, and for others it might sound easy. But there is a process to follow, because you can mess it up. Every time I get my students to try this, they run at it far too quickly. When we slow down and think about it, they get far more out of it.
Find one note, then build out ▶ 2:13
Unfortunately, for the purposes of demonstration, this exercise doesn't really work on me. As soon as I play a few notes, I can find where I am pretty quickly. But here's the process I'd follow if I couldn't hear what was going on.
Start with one string and find one note that works with the track. On my first track, using frets 2 to 5 on the high e string, the 2nd fret clearly didn't work. Quick tip: if the note you're playing doesn't work, the one a fret higher or lower probably will. The 3rd fret worked, so I held on to that and looked for one either side of it.
The 2nd and 4th frets didn't really fit, but the 3rd did. So it would make sense that the 1st and 5th frets might work too. We're being strict about our four frets, so the 1st is out, and I tried the 3rd and 5th together. Then I moved on to the B string: the 4th fret clearly didn't work, but the 5th and 3rd did.
So that's a little collection of four notes: 3 and 5 on the B string, 3 and 5 on the high e. If you find it hard to keep track as you build out, write the notes down. Make a list, or tab them out, in whatever way is easy for you to remember.
Be musical with what you've got ▶ 4:22
If you're not that familiar with your scales, you might already feel a bit lost. That's the point. You don't know what scale position you're in or what notes are around you, so you have to work with what you've got and be interesting with it.
Because you don't have a massive range of notes, you have to think more creatively. Then you add one note at a time, which is really useful, because you can hear exactly what that note is contributing to the music. One note might have a particularly emotional pull. Another might sound really strong, another a bit more mysterious. You don't need to know what the notes are or why they sound like that yet. Just notice it and make a note of it.
For perspective, on that first track the 4th fret on the high e string gave a harmonic minor sound to me. The track was in A minor, and that note is G sharp, the natural seventh. You don't need to know any of that to hear that it has a distinct flavour.
Start on the higher strings ▶ 7:30
I'd recommend starting on the three highest strings: G, B and high e. The thicker low E, A and D strings don't have as much tone to them, and lower notes are harder to tell apart, so it's harder to know when you've hit a wrong note down there. On the higher strings a wrong note pops out a lot more. As you get more comfortable, move down to the lower strings.
This is also where you can start bringing in technical ideas: a bit of legato, a slide, or throwing in a bend.
Try different fret ranges ▶ 8:05
On another track, staying on frets 2 to 5, the 4th fret on the high e wasn't working, but the 5th was, and now the 2nd was too. On the B string the 4th fret didn't work and the 3rd did. That one turned out to be E minor. Same four frets, a different set of safe notes.
Then try somewhere higher up, like frets 6 to 9. Those frets don't tend to get used as much. On my third track only the 7th and 8th frets worked on that string, and they were harder to find. The 7th didn't sound great on its own, but paired with the 8th it started to make sense.
It's important to try different fret ranges. A minor and E minor are really popular keys for backing tracks, so you'll run into them a lot. But the notes that work in A minor change depending on where you are on the neck, so a new fret range is a new puzzle. If you want to set the key yourself without knowing it in advance, the Backing Track Creator is handy for that.
Why it has an expiry date ▶ 9:44
Imagine you'd never played a guitar before and I said, "Here's a track, play along and create something musical." This is exactly what you'd have to do. By forcing yourself into that corner, you have to follow your ear and not your fingers.
As you learn your scale shapes and your ear gets stronger, you won't be able to do this any more, because you'll know straight away which shape you're in and which notes work. I can't really do it now. It's a good way of training my ear to find the key, but as soon as I've found it, that's it. I can see the box and its edges, and it's very hard to think outside it from there.
So do this exercise while you can. Shuffle a backing track playlist, pick four frets on the top three strings, find one note that works, and build out one note at a time. It'll really develop your musicality, and you won't be able to do it forever, so enjoy it while it lasts. If you want to train your ear away from the guitar too, have a go with the ear training tool.
