Essential, music theory is a method of communication. Musicians use musical notation and theory to pass ideas from one person to another. An experienced guitar player learning musical theory for the first time will probably see endless possibilities branching out from the musical ideas and technique he already has as he fits his knowledge into the wider context of music.

When you are learning a new piece of music, knowledge of theory will give you more choices in the matter of where to play on the fretboard, whether to use barre chords or open chords and how to put harmonies together. Knowing music theory will give you a framework which might inspire you to try ideas that your playing experience alone might not have presented you with.

Here is a video lesson on music theory from Allen ‘ROBOT’ Van Wert of MusicHopper.com

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Guitar beginners focus on learning the guitar fretboard as a complete job on its own. The idea is that once you know the notes in every position, you can start enjoying playing the guitar. Focusing on learning the guitar fretboard is not necessary. If you learn scales and chords in different keys in the first position, and then go onto learning barre chords and playing scales further up the fretboard, after some months you will have a working knowledge of the notes on the guitar. If you learn to play the guitar this way, you will learn the notes on the fretboard without thinking about it. And it probably won’t take any longer.

If you learn to play the piano, you learn the notes in the octave. You find that the C major scale is in the white keys, the incidentals are the black keys and the same rules apply to each octave on the keyboard. When you are learning the guitar fretboard there are no principles that you can apply to ALL the strings.

The C major scale CAN be found on the first and sixth strings on the guitar. Your guitar fretboard has dots at the third, fifth, seventh, ninth and twelfth frets. We rely on them to find the frets, even though classical and flamenco guitar players manage quite well without them. But they can help us learn the location of the C major scale. The first and sixth strings sound E when they are played open and the first fret is F, the third is G, the fifth is A and the seventh is B. That is where the dots run out, but you simply move up one fret to get C and to the tenth fret to get the note D. Then E sounds again at fret twelve.

You can make a start on learning the guitar fretboard by memorizing the C major scale on the E strings. To learn the notes on the other four guitar strings you will need to find more patterns but learning the C major scale and the work of playing notes will already be imprinted on your brain and in your fingers, so you will be surprised at how quickly learning the whole guitar fretboard will go.

We study the guitar as it is found in standard tuning. The notes in standard tuning are E A D G B E. If you change the tuning of your guitar in any way, the notes and their relationships are different, so learn the fretboard in standard tuning first, then go into other tunings later if you want to.

This video shows a way of learning the guitar fretboard using three patterns:

Here is an interesting blog post on learning scales that will hopefully get your fretboard-learning juices flowing.

And if you decide that learning theory is for you, at Guitar For Beginners And Beyond forum you will find Fretquiz which is an interesting way of learning or brushing up on your guitar music theory. FRETQUIZ: Guitar – Music Theory Quiz

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Jimi Hendrix is one guitarist who is said to have never learnt to read music, Eric Clapton and Slash are others. If you know any rock guitar players yourself, you might know one who looks down on theory and thinks that it just takes up time that could be used in playing.

Many guitar players know the major and minor pentatonic scales inside out. You can see that if you learn the notes they use in their solos. But it does not necessarily follow that they know the names of the scales they are using. If Eric Clapton learnt his licks from copying the material of the old blues players, of course he will show some knowledge of the minor pentatonic scale, but he does not show that he learnt it out of a book. He learnt it by playing solos derived from it.

What most guitar players see as rock guitar theory is basic things that every guitarist must learn like where to find the notes at any position on the fretboard and the boxes containing the scales, and how to move barre chords around.

You can learn to play guitar without learning theory. Guitar teachers will tell you that if they teach you a song you will learn nothing about how to play the guitar. They say you will just learn song after song without actually learning how to branch out and write your own material or learn songs by yourself. The early blues guitarists and flamenco guitarists up until very recently did not learn theory.

But if you want to communicate with other guitarists, and if you want to be sure of consistently getting work as a guitar player, you should learn theory. That’s the reality of the music business. Jimi Hendrix became known as the world’s greatest guitar player but he never had to work as a session musician. For that, even in rock, guitar theory is important.

Here is a blog post on the rules of music and the guitar which will give you something to think about.

A diagram of the notes on the fretboard will be useful. The video shows some techniques for learning where the notes are. When you try any of these exercises, only do them for a few minutes at a time. Longer than that will make them very boring and will become counterproductive.

Another approach to this aspect of guitar playing is Fretzilla, the guitarist’s web browser!

I recently got an email from William Wilson, a classical guitarist who has developed a bunch of tools and games to help student guitar players learn to play guitar, read music and fight space monsters. Personally, I think space monsters have been unfairly targeted as scapegoats for the global financial crisis but if fighting them helps people learn about music then I guess I can live with it.

William’s games are available at guitargames.net where you can try them for free or sign up for the complete set. The site includes comprehensive descriptions of the games and their purposes which also include some free tutorials on music that will help if you are a beginner struggling to understand how everything fits together.

Debate of a similar nature can be found in visual art. Many people believe that drawing skill is the basis of art and that every artwork you produce is a refinement of your natural draftsmanship. In writing, the place of grammatical rules is in question because a lot of people think that the use of the language can be learnt instinctively.

Many guitarists are adamant that the only way to learn guitar is by learning to read sheet music. Some even go so far as to say that if all guitar tab was removed from the world the level of guitar playing would be much higher. The main objection to that idea is that many famous guitar players never learnt to read sheet music. Some even have trouble with tab. Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Tommy Emmanuel and Jeff Beck are shining examples. Of course, all these guitarists were following their own idiosyncratic ways of expressing themselves through the guitar rather than learning a broad range of music but there are still those who are thinking of a whole world of music that is closed to people who have not learnt to read notation. What would possibly be raised if tab were eliminated would be the level of communication between guitarists because we would all be speaking the same langusage.

But it is highly unlikely that guitar players who have more of an instinctive approach to the guitar will ever take the trouble to learn theory and standard music notation. At the same time the people who have made the effort to learn to read music will continue to feel that they have a greater understanding of the guitar and the ability to learn new music faster than guitarists who do not have a background of theory at their fingertips.

You could say that the bottom line is what works for the individual. If you can play guitar but can’t read music, does that make you an inferior guitarist? A weakness with learning from tabs is that timing and rhythm can’t be learnt from tabs but some people write tabs incorporating the elements of sheet music notation that show note values and timing, and this kind of notation is very easy to learn.

There are those guitar players who see sheet music notation as a language that was invented by keyboard players and is not very well suited to the guitar. It should be noted that without learning musical theory as well, learning to read music is just a part of the language of music and is not a great deal more useful than tabs. Also the amount of music theory a guitarist learns is in proportion to his interest in music in general but will not necessarily make him a better guitar player than a guy who doesn’t read music.

It has often been pointed out by guitar players who play in an open or alternate tuning that if you are used to reading and playing music in standard tuning you might find it very difficult to sight read a piece written in an alternate tuning using standard musical notation. If this is true it would suggest that reading standard music is not the key to universal understanding of the guitar.

On the guitar we don’t have visual clues like we have on the piano so we need to know the names of the notes that are on the guitar and then work out our own formulas for finding and remembering the notes we need.

The notes on the guitar are A, B, C, D, E, F, G. The six strings on the guitar sound the notes E, A, D, G, B, E. So we have seven notes on six strings. The most obvious way to learn the locations of the notes on the guitar is to count from each of the notes on the open strings. If we look at the letters as an octave the notes go in a set pattern. The notes on the guitar always have a definite distance between them. The distance between the notes A and B, C and D, F and G is two frets. All the other notes go from fret to fret.

The fifth string on the guitar sounds the note A so let’s start with that. The open string is A, B is on the second fret, C is on the third fret, D is on the fifth fret, E is on the seventh fret, F is on the eighth fret and G is on the ninth fret. It might be easier to visualize the octave if I write it out as: A BC D E FG. The extra fret always appears between the same notes.

Now that you know the names of the notes on the open strings you can see that the first and the sixth strings both sound the note E, so once you know the notes on the sixth string, you know them on the first string. You could then proceed to find all the E notes on the other strings, and you will be able to identify the notes as they go up the guitar fretboard because you already know the pattern of distances between the notes.

You can make an exercise of finding all the instances of any note on the guitar. You can see how different the notes sound in there various positions because of the different thicknesses of the guitar strings. The notes found in the spaces between A B, C D, D E and E F are sharps and flats which is a whole other area of study. Basically the note above C is C Sharp (written as C#) or D Flat (written as Db). Here is a guitar fretboard chart diagram that you can download for free, and Guitarsphere has a blank guitar fretboard chart you can download and print out to help you to learn the fretboard or write your own music.

Here is a very helpful video on learning the guitar fretboard:

Here is a simple way to learn the fretboard notes from classical guitar forum.

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