Guitar Lesson 5:

Learning the fretboard can be a great tool for a guitarist. Learning the fretboard has many advantages.

• You will learn scales with ease.
• You will know all the different positions for chords
• You will be able to create different chords with ease.
• You will be able to pick out any note on the guitar.

With this in mind let's start learning the fretboard.

 

First, you have to know the notes for music. They are: A, B, C, D, E, F, G. Some of these notes have #'s: A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#. You might be asking yourself, what's with the #? What's that even suppose to mean? # is the symbol used for the music term 'sharp'.

 

A sharp is a raise in pitch. Also referred to as a semitone higher. For instance, a A# is a semitone higher than A.

 

 

In musical notation there are no sharp notes for B and E. There still is sharp for these notes though, it's just a semitone higher (B sharp would be C, and E sharp would be F).

Remember back in the lesson about tuning your guitar, how standard tuning was E, A, D, G, B, E. Well, these are the notes for the open strings (If you were to pick the string without fretting a note). 

 

Let's take each string a day at a time. For the first day I want you to memorize the E string (which is 2 strings on the guitar so that's 1 less string to learn). Each fret equals an interval.

 

An interval is the distance between two notes. A to A# is one interval.

 

Now that you know each fret equals an interval. That would mean if you fretted the first note on the E string, that would make it F (one interval after E is F). 2nd fret would be F#, and so on. Once you reach the 12th fret you'll be back at E again.

It sounds different because it's in a higher octave. An octave is a group of 8 notes. Frets 0 to 12 is one octave which is notes E to E. Frets 12 to 24 is also one octave which is also notes E to E. The difference between the two is the octave on frets 12 to 24 is an 'octave higher' than frets 0-12.

 

If you have dot marker inlays then just picture frets 12 to 24 a mirror image of frets 0 to 12 (just that the 12th fret has 2 dots, and obviously 0 has nothing). A good trick I use to memorize the notes is to go by the fret markers.

 

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