Olly’s Guitar World

Ok so if you read my last post “Understanding Musical Notes” then you will have learnt how you can count up the musical notes by imagining a piano. But what does this have to do with the guitar?

Well now you know how the notes work you need to go back to an earlier post regarding the names of the 6 strings on the guitar. As you will now know, the strings on the guitar are called (from thickest to thinnest):

E - A - D - G - B - E

With the guitar you do not have the black sharps and flats. You simply have frets. Each time you move your finger up one fret, the note gets higher. If we move up one fret we call this a semitone away from the last note. If we move up 2 frets then we call it a tone.

Lets work on the bottom E (remember that is the thickest string). Remembering how we counted up the notes on the piano, can you guess what note we will be playing if we put our finger on first fret and pick the E string?

Remembering that E is one of the notes that does not have a sharp we count up to F. Putting your finger on the first fret of the E string creates the note F!

So the next note should be easy to work out also. The very next note is the F#. If you put your finger on the 2nd fret of the E string you will have an F#.

3rd fret = G

4th Fret = G#

5th Fret = A

etc etc…..

Following this basic pattern you can work out all the notes on the E string. In fact, this is the same on every string. Just to prove it lets take the D string:-

open String = D

1st fret = D#

2nd fret = E

3rd fret = F

4th Fret = F#

5th Fret = G

etc…….

This works the same on every string so you now you should be able to easily count up to any note you desire to play!

This entry was posted on Friday, July 13th, 2007 at 6:47 pm and is filed under Guitar Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.