Learning The Notes On The Fretboard

One of the great challenges of learning the guitar is that the logic of the notes on the neck isn’t easily apparent. By contrast, think of the layout of a piano keyboard. Low notes are on the left, high notes on the right. Move from one white key to the next and move up or down through the musical alphabet. Skip a key and you skip a letter. To find a sharp or flat, replace a white key with the adjacent black one. It’s very clear and simple, strictly linear.

On the other hand, a scale fingering on guitar is actually quite random. 

How many notes per string? 

When do you change strings? 

Why do the fingerings change so much from one scale to another, and why are there so many of them? The challenges this presents are enough to intimidate some people away from learning to play melody or “lead”. But fortunately, there IS logic to the guitar neck. 

It’s more complex than the layout of a keyboard, but there’s actually a direct relationship.

The notes on every string of the guitar are linear, in the sense that we progress through the scale as we move along the string.

So moving from an open string up the neck is like moving along a keyboard from left to right. Note that “up” in this sense means rising in pitch, moving away from the headstock. The frets divide the string up into a series of half-steps, just like the white and black keys of the keyboard. To play a chromatic scale, start with the open string and simply move along the string from one fret to the next. This is like striking every key of the keyboard in sequence from left to right.

The piano, of course, has a wider range than the guitar. A full 88-key keyboard spans just over seven octaves, while the average guitar will reach a little below four. (An octave is the distance between a given note and the next higher or lower note with the same letter name). Some electric guitars go all the way up to 24 frets to complete that fourth octave. A single string has a total range of just under 2 octaves, but the frets above the 12th are used fare less often and rarely on the bass strings. So for the most part, the average skilled player is working within an octave-plus on each string.

LEARN THE MUSICAL ALPHABET FIRST

Learning the musical alphabet is not learning how to read music but it's important if you want to learn notes across the fretboard and being able to tune your guitar.

Explore by playing simple melodies on a single string.

The first lesson I would often give a young child would be to play a simple melody by sliding a finger along the first string.

Happy Birthday, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star are 2 good tunes for this exercise.

Great Beginners Guitar Book 

http://learnguitarcafe.com/guitar-mastery

I recommend this book for anyone wanting to learn the guitar from home

http://learnguitarcafe.com/guitar-mastery