Category: Music Notes

Many guitarists develop a comfort zone of positions on the fretboard that they experience difficulty getting out of. The most basic is when you start off on the guitar by learning the notes and chords in the first position and somehow never get round to finding out where the notes and chords are further up the guitar’s neck.
So today I have listed a bunch of places on the web where you can get some encouragement to explore the possibilities of the guitar more fully.
1. “Most guitar players are victims of their own quick-fix mentality. “Why learn every scale in every key if I can use a ‘cookie-cutter shape’ scale pattern that I can move around the guitar neck and play the same notes?” What happens is that a large number of players know their scales if somebody holds their hand and takes them to the root note or starting point of the scale, but what they don’t learn is what notes they are playing and how they all relate together. And, more importantly, how to use the scales to make music that doesn’t sound like they’re “trapped in a box”.”Break Out Of The Box - Learn all of the notes on the fretboard
2. A tutorial on learning the notes on the guitar neck. Guitar Fretboard notes
3. “Memorizing the name of the notes on the entire fretboard may seem like a daunting task, because a standard guitar has 21 or more frets. That’s 126 or more frets with notes to memorize… or is it? In reality it’s not as bad as that. We’ve made it as simple as possible.
Below is a 5 step tutorial that will help you become familiar with the fretboard and it’s notes. You don’t have to learn them all right away but it’s a long term goal that you should strive for, so working on learning them on a regular basis is a good idea.” Discover The Fretboard
4. “Some things you can do with the scale and chord tone diagram printer:
Generate guitar scales or bass scales on the fretboard.
View and print scales for drop-D tuning on a guitar or bass fretboard.
Display the notes to guitar chords on the fret board.
Find your own guitar chord voicings by assembling the arpeggio notes of chords in various ways.
Print out all the guitar notes on the guitar fretboard or bass notes on the bass fretboard.
Create printable blank fretboard diagrams for any number of strings in any shape or size.
Create and print scales for violin, cello, double bass and other fretless string instruments.
Show the notes of natural harmonics on the guitar, bass guitar or any other stringed instrument.
Generate diagrams for almost all scales and chords from the vast scale and chord dictionary.
Make left-handed guitar fretboard diagrams.” Scale and Chord Tone Fretboard Printer
And finally a dude giving us a video lesson on the guitar notes:

Technorati Tags: learning the notes on the guitar

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Guitar tabs are an easy solution for you if you have no idea of how to read sheet music but are constantly bugged by the notion that you want to be a guitarist. Guitar tabs are easy to learn and allow you to begin playing songs right away, even if you are not familiar with them. Once you have bought your first guitar, it is time to begin looking for easy guitar tab versions of some songs to find out what it feels like to be a guitar player. Which songs you need tabs for depends on how you see yourself as a musician. Do you want to play your favorite songs chiefly for your own amusement or do you want to aim your repertoire at a potential audience? Let us look at your audience for a minute. The most popular songs in the world are all from years gone by. If you sit a bunch of people aged between ten and fifty down and play songs at them you will find some universal favorites, and they will all be old songs. If you want to please a random audience, your ultimate goal should be to have about one hundred popular songs ranging from the 1940’s to the present, but you could probably narrow the range to just include songs going back to the sixties.
So what are the easiest songs to learn from tabs? What can a beginner guitarist learn quickly without too much trouble? Well, I did a little searching on the internet concerning that question, and I found that “Horse With No Name” contains only two chords, and dead simple ones at that! You could be playing that song in a convincing fashion today! “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door” makes use of the chords G D C and Am - all easy chords. Building on chords you have acquired learning these songs, you can go onto “House Of The Rising Sun” which uses Am C D F E and E7. Once you have learnt that, it’s only natural to go onto another beautiful song, “California Dreamin’” which has the same chords. If you do not like the idea of beginning your guitar playing with these songs, do an internet search in the country music and blues genres. Actually a working knowledge of twelve bar blues is very useful for a guitar player just starting out.
Now for a short list of songs that are both easy to play and have proven to be popular with audiences of all ages. You can find tab arrangements for these songs by typing the titles into a search engine.
“Angie” by The Rolling Stones
“Blowin’ In The Wind” by Bob Dylan
“Brown Eyed Girl” by Van Morrison
“A Day In The Life”, “Here, There And Everywhere” and “Hey Jude” by The Beatles
“I Walk The Line” by Johnny Cash
“Tears In Heaven” by Eric Clapton
“Gloria” by Van Morrison
“Hotel California” by The Eagles
“Behind Blue Eyes” by The Who
“Scarborough Fair”
“White Room” by Cream
Once you have some guitar songs under your belt, you could learn more popular favorites that do not fit into the “Easy Guitar Tabs” category. Wilson Pickett’s “Dock Of The Bay” and “American Pie” by Don Mclean come to mind. But do not let the tastes of the masses be your only guide. If, for example, you decide you would like to do a folk guitar arrangement of Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” then you could use tabs for the original electric guitar version as a basis for your new work. With a bunch of easy guitar tabs at your disposal, the only limits to your musical achievements are your imagination and your audience’s supply of tomatoes.
If you are really interested in learning easy tab versions of songs, here is Easy Songs Database at Guitar Noise. You will need to join the forum but it is well worth it!
And to follow the idea of learning to play blues, here is a youtube video from Justin Guitar.

Technorati Tags: Guitar tabs, easy guitar tab, easiest songs to learn, twelve bar blues

Like all burning questions, the answer to this is both “yes” and “no”. Guitar playing is what people these days call a “journey”. What that means is that you will have times when the job ahead is too hard, too tiring, too boring and too much. Then if you persist, you will be rewarded by a sudden insight or upgrading of physical skills. Anybody who has learnt touch typing knows what I’m talking about. So the process of giving life and meaning to the little dots on the page will be off-putting at first followed by a feeling of having learnt something very valuable. What you need to begin this process of learning to read music is a good, concise tutorial. Something that says stuff like, “our notes are displayed upon what is called a “staff.” This is a set of five horizontal lines and four spaces between each line. Don’t laugh, the spaces are important. It is where these notes are positioned in the staff, on which line or space they occupy, which determines what note you play. And here’s the beauty of it - the position will always be the same. If you want the note sounded by the open B string, for example, it will always occupy the place on the staff. Once you know where it is you will always know where it is.” Good basic info. David Hodge is the author of this tutorial, and it is called, A Guide To Reading Musical Notation

Technorati Tags: learning to read music, A Guide To Reading Musical Notation