Learning String Names and notes on the Guitar fretboard?

Monday, 15th June 2009

Guitar Guide for Beginners Guitar Tips, and Tricks

Learning the String names on your Guitar?

This is going to be one of the most vital lessons, for any new guitar player, or even a person that has been playing the guitar for a few years that we cover. Learning the notes of your strings and the notes up and down the fretboard, is vital in growing as a musician/guitar player! Learning this will separate the great guitar players from the not so great players!

Why is this such a vital skill to learn?

Once you learn the string notes and notes across your neck, you can start applying your music theory knowledge of scales and chord shapes
You can start constructing chords up and down the neck, and across the neck.*
Learning the String names, make it easy to learn the notes up and down each string on the neck.

Let’s try to break this down so it will be easy for you to understand and remember. A great thing to keep in mind when trying to learn all the note names and string names, is to start slow. Make sure you do not try to take on too much at one time, because this could force you to give up to early! Let’s take a look at the string names first:

The 6th string is the low E string.
The fifth string, which is called the A, string.
The 4th string, which is known as the D string.
Then, comes the 3rd string and this is called the G string.
Next, is the 2nd string, which is called the B string.
Lastly, if your not bored already is the 1st and final string, which is called the high E string.

Learning the notes on the neck?

The easiest way to learn the names on the notes up and down the fretboard is by starting with on string and learning all them up to the 12 fret, and then working your way down to the rest of the strings. Like I mentioned above, always start slow when learning anything new on the guitar, because you do not want to overwhelm yourself, and loose interest!

Now how do you go about learning these different notes up and down the fretboard, well you already know them, when you were a kid you learned your ABC’s, and in music we use A-G to name the notes. One thing you need to keep in mind is the shapes and flats, so we are going to get into basic music theory. I will list all the notes below starting with A, and ending on G:

A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A- As you can see between B and C, and E and F there is not sharp, so always keep that in mind! Now we need to worry about flats:

If we take the first few notes of a C major scale (C, D, E, F) and we move the d down a 1/2 step this would be D flat, and not C#. We will cover this in future lesson, but for this lesson we are just going to learn on the notes on the fretboard.

Here is a reference chart you can use below, but first let’s look at the 6th string low E, and break it down on how to figure out these notes on the fretboard. There is a total of 12 frets, and when you pick the open 6th string, this would be E, and if you place a finger on the 1st fret, the name of the note would be F, so let’s breakdown the 6th string: