Abstract
Researchers and performers have long intuited that popular music’s organizational features are linked to the physical-tonal properties of the electric guitar. Yet current evidence is either too broad or too specific to support reliable generalizations. Ongoing corpus studies offer remarkable explanatory power in clarifying stylistic trends from a listener’s perspective but are not currently equipped to address the kinesthetic aspects of instrument performance.
 In this study I employ statistical methods of corpus analysis to explore how popular-music guitarists navigate the fretboard. I do so via a digital collection of guitar tablature: 257 rhythm-guitar parts sampled from seven decades of songs (1954–2019). An analysis of fretboard transitions reveals a highly idiomatic fretboard profile that aligns best with the minor pentatonic scale. This empirically supports standing intuitions about the relationship between pentatonicism and guitar performance, while underscoring the methodological and potential ethical shortcomings of a strictly harmonic perspective on popular music’s organization.
Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
