This is a natural difficulty for many musicians.
I would begin by suggesting your reluctance to dive into dots/notes is part of your problem. Having said that, maybe tab is NOT ok for the way you want to play music. There is definitely more available to a musician who has some understanding of what all the notes are there for.
Knowing scales as patterns and numbers will only take you so far. Knowing all the notes on your fretboard and being able to think of scales in terms of the notes themselves drastically improves the memorization of these forms.
When you begin to see your guitar as a huge spectrum of intervals and not just places to put your fingers. Arpeggios and scales really jump out at you. This is one reason that great players are able to improvise with complex combinations of scales and arpeggios. They can see, for example, that a simple Major triad arpeggio can easily be manipulated into several other kinds of arpeggios with slight alterations.
For example.
If you arpeggiated the notes G B D. You have a G maj triad.
If you played the same thing but continuing like so. G B D A C E you will get the sound of a G maj 9 11 13 arpeggio. The first three notes being your strong chord tones and the other three being our more ‘colorful’ tones from the G maj chord.
Once you know where these notes are and know that each of them serve a particular role in the G maj harmony. You can identify the 11th C and raise it by a half step. giving you the option of playing it as G B D A C# E. Now we have a G maj 9 #11 13 harmony, which is a more preferable sound.
How about if we make that 11 natural again and flatten the B.
G Bb D A C E. This gives us a nice Gm 9 11 13 arpeggio.
Lower the 5th D, to Db. and raise the E to F
G Bb Db A C F. This is a Diminished arpeggio.
Practicing like this can be a good use of time. Reciting the notes as you play them and thinking of the chord you would play those notes over is great for building connections in your mind.
Anyway, you may be able to do these things already.
It really depends what you mean by ‘play better’ in the end though. If you want to be able to do more complex and technically demanding things on your instrument. A lot of repetitive practice will do the trick usually.
If its a more theoretical approach. I would suggest exercises like the ones listed above to begin with. If so, id be happy to get more specific with things you can work on to develop these skills.
Mike.
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