Memorizing Notes On Guitar Fretboard

A guitar player who can play from written music or tab, who can improvise with no trouble is a guitarist who can memorize the notes on the guitar fretboard. This is not a finite goal that can be reached in a specific time frame. You will be working on this task for as long as you are playing the guitar. Fortunately learning your way around the guitar can be alot of fun.

If you do not have familiarity with the guitar notes it will be very difficult for you to learn to improvise. When you are improvising freely you still need the assurance of knowing which fret to go to next. One good thing about memorizing the guitar notes is that it will make it easier for you to write your own music. As well as that you will have your own musical understanding when you are learning the music of other composers. Working with other musicians can be difficult for a guitar player who can play by ear but is unable to communicate what they no by tab or sheet music.

So musch for the advantages of memorizing the notes on the guitar fretboard. The sad reality is that very few guitar players actually go through the process of learning their fretboard thoroughly. The trouble is, a mental block springs up for many guitarists when they are faced with what seems like a huge and mind-boggling job. Learning the notes on a piano is comparatively straightforward because tonce you know one octave, yuou know them all. They just appear at different positions on the keyboard. There is no such easily seen pattern on the guitar fretboard.

The solution to finding patterns on the guitar fretboard is musical scales and chords. The notes on the open sixth string on the guitar are E F G A B C D. Within this sequence of notes are two places where there is only half a step between the notes. Those places are between E and F, and B and C. This means you do not skip a fret between these pairs of notes.

So now we have the names of the all the notes we can find on the guitar, let us look for more ways to make sense of the fretboard. To begin with take the note C, locate it on the sixth string in the first position, which is at the eighth fret. Now keep going and find and play all the C’s on all strings. The key here is to simply explore the fretboard. Do not attempt to memorize the notes. Once you have spent some time on this exercise your brain will have made its own patways to help you remember where the notes are. You will have your own gernre that you regard as your favorite. So now you can use your favorite music to help you to memorize the notes. If you flamenco you could learn the notes in the Phrygian mode in the key of E. If you play blues, you could find the notes in the blues scale in all positions on the fretboard. As a variation on this approach look for the notes found in a particular chord.

How you succeed in memorizing the notes on the guitar fretboard will be a result of how good you are at finding more ideas for exploring the guitar. The more you challenge yourself and the more you experiment the quicker you gain confidence in your knowledge of guitar music.

Here is a video tutorial on learning the guitar fretboard . . .