So something I’ve experienced far to often is learning a pattern, playing it in practice for years, then spending time on other patterns and rarely playing past learnt pattern, then trying it again… And being totally stumped.
It quite unnerving as there are so many patterns I’ve got to know sooooo well, yet a year or so of not playing it, and its gone. Perhaps my understanding of the fretboard is whats holding me back here.
What sort of patterns are you wanting to retain? Is it single string stuff? Long runs (i.e. two bars or more with little repetition), or are they scales/arpeggios or related sequences? I’m just wondering if there is any way to group this stuff in chunks either physically or mentally…or going down another road and evaluating the utility of memorizing these patterns in terms of what you want to achieve musically.
Arpeggio. A string of three of them. I’ve been thinking about it.
I don’t understand the theory of them really, and I have no associations with them, so no other patterns coming off them or played in them.
Meaning its mostly saved as a single entity which has little neural pathways to it. Like the name of someone you only met a few times.
Very little connections for me to just think about the jist of it and then have the info come to me.
It’s almost exactly like coming to a dead end in a maze. If there are not multiple routes to the exit, it’s very hard to find.
This immediately suggests to me that the solution is to write several different licks with that, and spend some time trying to remember to use it when improvising. I know all of my best-known shapes, the ones that I have under my fingers even after taking a six-month break, are ones that I use when improvising.
I think you hit the nail on the head. Theory and musical concepts provides a network to connect all of your chunks. Without it you just have floating data points.