Thursday, July 28, 2011

How To Play Guitar: The Notes On The Guitar (NG04)

What's up future rock stars!!!
Hope your guitar learning journey is going well.
Are you ready for a little bit of music theory?

The word theory sounds boring to most, which is totally understandable. When you think theory you probably think long, complicated and completely useless explanations. However, in music this isn't the case. Most music theory is pretty easy. Today we are going to talk about all the notes in western music, that's right ALL of them...all twelve notes. Twelve notes suddenly sound less scary doesn't it? Well here they are:

A – A#/Bb – B – C – C#/Db – D – D#/Eb – E – F – F#/Gb – G – G#/Ab

Now let's see exactly what we have here because some of these notes have weird signs next to them. Let's start with the seven plain notes, A B C D E F G, those are the white keys on the piano. If you place the C on the first spot you get the most basic major scale, one that is probably familiar to most of you:
C D E F G A B C, or Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do

Next we'll discuss those weird signs # and b, those are simply the sharps (#) or flats (b) of every note, sharp means the note is a semitone higher, and flat means it is a semitone lower. On the piano those are the black keys. You probably noticed that the B and E don't have sharps, well they do, but a B# is the same as C and a Cb the same as a B.

It's a good idea to learn all the notes on the guitar on every string, this will help you later with finding chords and scales all over the fretboard. Knowing the name of the note you play is a useful skill over all, if you are jamming and a musician asks you to play a G and a D you'll know what to do.

The notes on the guitar:
The twelfth fret closes the octave, the notes just repeat themselves beyond that. (If the picture below is too small, you can enlarge it by clicking it.)














A good way to learn them all is to learn them one note at a time on all strings. Start with the C for example, play it on the low E-string, then the A, etc... Use a metronome at a slow pace and keep hitting the same note one string at a time while following the metronome, when you are comfortable at a certain speed, speed it up, go as fast as you can and only then go to the next note. This may take a while but it's a good way to get to know the fretboard and to learn all the notes.

Hope this helped you out, if it did, don't hesitate to subscribe.
Don't forget to listen and have fun!!!

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