About

Fretboard Knowledge exists for one idea: the guitar makes sense once you understand the fretboard. Not licks, not song tutorials. The underlying knowledge of notes, intervals, scales and chords that lets you play anything, anywhere on the neck.

Who writes this

My name is Alexander Stakenburg. I have taught guitar full time in the Netherlands since 2007, at my own school, Gitaarschool Ermelo. Everything on this site is worked out in those lessons first; if you are anywhere near Ermelo, that is where you can sit across from me instead of reading me.

I came to the instrument late. There was music in the house from the start, jazz mostly, and I spent my early teens at the piano and programming music on a computer. The piano lessons never took. Nothing in them asked me to improvise or make anything up, and that was the part I wanted. I did not pick up a guitar until I was about sixteen.

After that I taught myself, until I was admitted to the jazz guitar faculty of the Hilversum Conservatory, at the time the conservatory for jazz in this country. It merged with the Conservatory of Amsterdam while I was studying there, and that is where I took my final exam in 2000. Seven years in IT followed, which taught me more about explaining things clearly than I expected. Since September 2007 I have taught full time, alongside playing and recording.

Why this site exists

In the years before the conservatory I knew nobody who could tell me how to get good at this instrument. I worked things out slowly and in the wrong order, and far too often thought: I wish somebody had told me that five years ago.

That sentence is the reason this site is here. Technique and repertoire carry you a certain distance; what opens the instrument up is understanding what you are looking at. Where the notes are. Why a shape works. What a scale is made of. Give someone that, and they stop needing a teacher for every next step.

What I play

© JKey Photography

Jazz, in the broadest sense of the word. If it swings, or has a solid groove and good chords, I am in. Blues and country have always been in my playing too. I think of myself as an electric player, though acoustic has taken a far bigger place in recent years, gypsy jazz in particular, and I am happy to pick up a bass when a band needs one.

Guitar was the right choice. It travels, it can solo and accompany, and there are dozens of kinds of them, each with its own sound. Variety, which is what I like.

Beyond music I am a family man first: a father, a husband, a Christian. That is where the rest of it draws its energy from.

Where this leads

The articles here are the free, foundational layer, and they will stay that way. The interactive practice, every scale and chord visualised on the neck in any key and tuning, lives in Fretly, the app built around this same way of looking at the instrument.

For the deep end of it, start with Allan Holdsworth’s 10 most usable scales. Hearing Secrets while I was at the conservatory rearranged what I thought the guitar could do, and this site would look very different without it.