Learning The Guitar Fretboard

Guitar students often focus on learning the guitar fretboard as a task on its own. They feel that once you know all the notes in all the positions, you can get down to the business of playing the guitar. So, we should start this article with the statement that learning the guitar fretboard as a distinct project is not necessary. If you learn to play the guitar systematically, by learning 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 choose to learn the guitar by learning chords, then playing some songs, then learning the notes on the guitar fretboard, it seems like a less boring and tedious task than learning to play one key at a time, but it won't be any quicker. If you decide to commence learning the guitar fretboard then you should know how to play some simple chords and scales, at the very least, so that you have something to relate to as you learn the entire fretboard.

Learning the guitar fretboard is a fairly difficult job because there are really no big, all-encompassing ideas that apply to all the notes on the guitar. 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 you will find that there are no principles that you can apply to all the strings. Let's make one ground rule clear, though, 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 alter 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.

The C major scale CAN be found on the first and sixth strings on the guitar. You will notice that your guitar fretboard has dots that mark the third, fifth, seventh, ninth and twelfth frets. These dots can be a pain because we come to 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.

So, you have made a start on learning the guitar fretboard by memorizing the C major scale on the E strings. The work involved in learning these notes will not be wasted. To learn the notes on the other four guitar strings you will need to find other patterns but the C major scale and playing notes will already be imprinted on your brain and in your fingers, so you will be surprised at how quickly learning the guitar fretboard in its entirety will pass.