If you are one of the many people looking to learn guitar notes, what are you going to do with these notes when you learn them? There is an idea alive and well in a lot of people's heads that if you want to learn how to play the guitar, all you need is to find out where to put your fingers to play the notes, and there is nothing more you need to do.
In fact, learning the guitar notes is a very small but important part of guitar playing.
So let us take a look at the other pieces of the puzzle.
Guitar playing is based more on learning chords than on playing single notes.
If you listen to solo guitar playing, it usually consists of a combination of single melody notes, bass notes and chords.
Anyway, having established that there is much more to guitar playing than learning guitar notes, let us take a look at these notes we are so anxious to learn.
Standard tuning for a six string guitar is, starting at the lowest note, E A D G B E.
If we take an acoustic guitar without a cutaway body as having the minimum number of reachable notes, that gives us twelve frets worth of notes to play.
But the guitar can only give us a total of thirty-seven different notes, so that means we have lots of different positions on the guitar neck to play the same note.
Now let us go back to basics for a bit.
You probably know that musical notes are named after the first seven notes of the English alphabet.
At least, they are if you play the guitar in English.
So starting with the sixth string that plays the note E, on the first six frets you have F G A B C D, then you start again at E on the seventh fret, right? Wrong! The steps between notes are not uniform.
Starting with the open string E, the first fret is F, but the second fret is not G but F sharp there are sharps after A C D F and G.
There are no sharps between B and C or between E and F.
So if we look at the sixth guitar string again, instead of starting the next octave with E on the seventh fret, we start with E on the twelfth fret.
So let us look at the notes on all the strings of the guitar up to the twelfth fret: E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D D# E B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A A# B G G# A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G D D# E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G# A E F F# G G# A A# B C C# D D# E So the notes at the twelfth fret of each string on the guitar are the same as the notes sounded by the open strings.
You can use this diagram to pick out tunes if you already know how to read music.
If you do not know how to read music yet, you can start finding out how to learn the guitar notes by finding recurring patterns up and down the fretboard.