All the ear training and audiation work in this course has been building toward this: translating the sounds in your head directly into physical finger movements, without having to think consciously about it. This lesson gives you two specific exercises to start building that connection — neural fingering and the chromatic elbow — both of which can be practised anywhere, at any time, without the guitar.
What you’ll get out of this lesson: You’ll understand the concept of neural fingering — hearing pitches internally as you press down the fingers that would play them — and learn the chromatic elbow technique, a forearm-based visualisation exercise that maps the chromatic scale to a physical gesture, building the intuitive link between imagination and fingers.
The core idea — the fretboard should be heard, not seen
There should be a subconscious connection between your hands and your mind’s ear — something much deeper than just seeing scales. The goal is an intuitive relationship between your fingers and the sounds in your head, so that expressing an internally heard melody doesn’t have to pass through conscious filters on its way from your brain to your fingers. This exercise is one of the foundational steps toward that, and it works no matter where you are in your playing.
This lesson is inspired by the book “Essential Ear Training for Guitar and Bass” by Gary Willis, which is well worth seeking out.
Neural fingering
Take any scale position you know. Now, away from the guitar, imagine you’re playing that scale — use the fingers that would actually fret those notes, press them down, and connect each finger press to your thumb as an anchor. As you do this, try to hear the notes as loudly as possible in your head, exactly as you ascend and descend. The louder and clearer the sound becomes, the stronger the connection between your mind’s ear and your fingers is growing. Once this works with scales, take it to licks. Take a lick you know well, work out the finger pattern, and hear it as vividly as you can while you play those fingers. Spend weeks on this. Do it for the rest of your life. Do it whenever you have a spare moment.
The louder that gets, the stronger your connection is. That’s the first exercise. Give that a try. Spend weeks on that. Do it for the rest of your life. Do it whenever you can. It’s incredible.
The chromatic elbow
The chromatic elbow refines the neural fingering idea by mapping notes to positions on the forearm rather than to the thumb. The forearm is divided into three positions for the hand, and across those positions the twelve notes of the chromatic scale are assigned: Do, Ra, Re, Me, Mi, Fa, Fi, Sol, Si, La, Te, Ti — and an octave Do at the elbow. In this way, moving the hand up the forearm mirrors the rising pitch of the chromatic scale, similar to the way the Kodály hand gestures use height to represent pitch. The goal is to hear the scale rise as you move up the forearm — to scream the notes in your head as clearly as possible while the hand makes its gesture.
What to practise on the chromatic elbow
The chromatic scale itself is a good place to start — most people practise it far less than they should. Work up and down. Skip notes to practise intervals: unison, second, third, fourth. Practise major and minor scales by skipping the non-scale tones. Sing the solfège syllables aloud as you go. Check your pitching regularly against a tuner: hum a starting pitch, find it on the tuner, practise for five minutes, then come back and check whether you’ve stayed in tune. You can also put on a backing track and improvise using the chromatic elbow as your “instrument”, singing the soul bass as you move your fingers to suggest the notes.
Taking it further: Once the chromatic scale feels natural on the forearm, practise going from any one note to any other — up a fourth, down a minor third — and try to feel the distance before you hear the note. That spatial sense of interval, connected to the physical gesture, is exactly what transfers back to the guitar when you pick it up.
Your homework: Every day this week, spend five minutes on neural fingering — take a scale or two licks you know and hear them as loudly as possible while pressing the finger patterns. Then spend five minutes on the chromatic elbow: go up and down the chromatic scale, sing the solfège syllables, and check your pitching at the end of each session with a tuner or phone app.