Every beginner learning to play guitar is faced with the scary task of learning the notes on the guitar fretboard. Back in times gone by, you learnt to play the guitar by getting a book that explained the names of all the musical notes, where they were on the fretboard and you were given a scale or two.
Any songs or instrumental pieces you learnt were written in music notation and you became familiar with where the notes occur on the guitar in the course of learning to play. This is still a good way to learn the notes but, of course, a large number of people opt for learning to read tabs rather than sheet music, so we need to explore other ways of getting the notes into our fingers, heads and hearts.
As you learn the positions of the notes you will find that you can form chords in any position, play scales all over the fretboard and impress friends and family with your sight reading ability. You will also be forming the basis of your soloing and improvising expertise by learning where all the notes are.
The term “all the notes” is unnecessarily daunting because in fact there are only seven of the little buggers. A B C D E F G.
Here’s where the first bit of learning comes in. The intervals. The scale notes BC and EF are like Siamese twins. There are no frets between them. All the other notes are separated by frets, for instance, on the fifth string C is at the third fret and D is at the fifth fret.
The next basic piece of knowledge in learning how to play guitar is the names of the strings. E A D G B E. You probably know that already but now you can start putting that knowledge to use. You can expand it to make the deduction that there is no space between the E and the F on the sixth and first strings. So now you can slowly work your way up the sixth string, naming the notes as you go and being glad that the notes are exactly the same on the first string, which leaves only four strings still to learn.
The sequence of notes starts again at the twelfth fret on all strings. If you are starting to get confused, here is a guitar fretboard diagram, and we have tabs for the guitar notes here on this site.
Your guitar probably has dots or inlays at the third, fifth, seventh and ninth frets, so you can learn by looking at the fretboard diagram which notes are at those frets, and now there’s another bit of knowledge that will be handy when you are fondly exploring the neck of your guitar. Here is a video to help you with finding the notes on the guitar.
So, now you have a couple of tricks that will help you learn how to read guitar notes, let’s get back to sight reading. The thing with sight reading music notes is, it keeps your eyes looking at the music and not at the frets. This is a great way to learn so that you don’t progress in your learning with a dependence on looking at the frets. The fact is that after a while you will not really need to look at the frets but your body will be so used to doing it, any distraction will take your attention away from playing.
Another way to learn the notes without sight reading is to arbitrarily pick any note. Let’s say the E note. Find that note in all positions on the sixth and fifth strings. Once you have found the note on those strings, move to the fourth and third, then the second and first. But you don’t just find the notes in your own time, you play the notes in unison with your metronome set at a very slow speed. The key to learning quickly is to find ways to get your body to do the learning rather than relying entirely on your head.
One tool that will help you with learning the guitar notes is the fretboard diagram generator. You can use it to print out your own diagram of the guitar fretboard. You can also use it to print out diagrams of chords and scales.
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[...] post is a further lesson on how to read guitar notes for beginners. One technique that will help you to learn the notes on the guitar is to sing the notes as you are [...]
[...] post is a further lesson on how to read guitar notes for beginners. One technique that will help you to learn the notes on the guitar is to sing the notes as you are [...]
Great lesson. You’ve got some really good tips here!