What do you wish you would’ve done differently?

[Brandon7s]

Have you ever heard of "A.C.E. Guitar Method"? It has an entire section devoted to learning the fretboard note/interval relationships, and starts by covering simple octaves. It's the best, most easily-grasped, method of explaining this stuff I've ever come across. It's free to download, but the author asks that it not be shared, so all you'd have to do if you want it, is a Google search, and it should come up.

I'll take a look. I've been brute forcing it with an app named Fretonomy (both on my iPad and my Andoid phone) when I'm not at my guitar and that has worked pretty well for learning the note names decently well; however, I've found that simply practicing 7th chord arpeggios while saying the name and the interval has been great for internalizing it.

I tend to think of chords/triads/arpeggios through the lense of CAGED. Meaning, CAGED provides the landmarks that I use to navigate the fretboard. I'll look into A.C.E method, I'm always interested in seeing if another POV would be of value for me.

 

[Sascha Franck]

however, I've found that simply practicing 7th chord arpeggios while saying the name and the interval has been great for internalizing it.

This.
Well, not necessarily exactly this, but all memorizing and what not IMO is pretty much pointless without practical exposure.

There's lots of ways to skin this cat, but all of the efficient ones include very little printed (or displayed) stuff but a lot of practically applied DIY things.
Example: Play a C triad, root position, D. G, B strings. Proceed with the inversions (same set of strings). Good? Kinda. But that's the stuff which you'd also see on paper. But now create a Cmin triad out of each of them. For that to happen, you need to know where in the chord the E note is located because that's the one you need to lower by a halfstep (hence to Eb) to get a Cmin triad. Now we're talking, because your brain is actively forced to do some work instead of just memorizing some shapes. You can proceed from there. Add a drone C bass note, then replace the C in your triad with a Bb to get to a C7 chord. Or a Cmin7. Now replace the 5th (G) with a 6th (A) to get a C6. Or Cmin6. Or even C13 (in case you also replaced the root C with the seventh Bb).
This is one method to learn note positions pretty quickly. Or rather "degree positions", as the guitar lends to relative functional positions rather than to absolute shapes (which is what, say, a piano is based around).

 

[GTR37]

Oh man great question
So many things I could say
Practice more with a metronome , learn to play a bit cleaner , muting techniques but I think the one thing I would say to young me
Is surround yourself with players that are better than you are or songwriters that are better than you are