Learn The Guitar Fretboard

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You CAN learn the guitar fretboard but it will require some effort. The piano keyboard presents the musical notes in a simple pattern but the guitar notes are arranged in patterns that, because there are no guides like the black and white piano keys, are a little tricky to see.

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: