Learning the Fretboard
To some people, learning the fretboard comes relatively easily and can be visualised effectively. For others there is a much steeper learning curve and, more commonly than I would like to admit, some players do not know the fretboard at all… apart from maybe that the 12th fret on the E string is an E note.
In this blog post, I will share some of my experiences when fretboard knowledge would have completely turned a situation around, my thoughts on if you actually need to learn the fretboard and provide some small pieces of advice for learning all of those notes.
Do You Actually Need to Lean All of Those Notes?
Short answer? Yes.
As a professional musician and teacher, I can say from a place of experience that it is very useful to learn the fretboard. It can help with learning songs, communicating with other musicians and can improve your playing in a whole host of other areas.
If you are wondering whether or not you can survive otherwise, absolutely. However, I often liken to this to walking from Tokyo to Hokkaido on your holiday. Yes, you could actually do this, but is it really worth the struggle?
Long story short, if someone says that you do not need to learn the fretboard, they are just wrong.
The Horror Story
Many years ago, I was at an event that had a local band performing a set of cover songs. They new I played guitar and they asked me if I would like to join them for one of them and, being the impulsive young adult that I was, I jumped at the chance. Due to the fact that I did not know what the song was going to be, I asked them “what is the chord progression?”. They could have responded with “It is a I vi ii V in B” or “B G#m C#m F#” – either of those would have been perfectly acceptable responses.
Is that what happened? Nope.
Instead, I was told “We don’t know chords, we only know shapes”. This was clearly not helpful! In the context of a guitar lesson, a teacher can direct a student to play a particular shape from a specific place with a long yet clear instruction. There is not the time to do that when you are strapping on someone else’s guitar with a room of people watching.
If the members of that band could have at least told me the root note of each chord, I could have made my own voicing choices. In the end I threw caution to the wind and told them to start and I would figure it out. Thankfully, it was a straight forward Elvis Presley tune that followed a standard twelve bar blues chord progression.
As a brief bonus anecdote, there have been so many times where I have been teaching a student (that should have known better!) and they play very well in one particular key, let us say G, for example. They know they can play from the third fret of the E string, but the moment I say “Let’s play in F#” they fall apart.
Actually Learning Those Notes
You may have all seen one of those really dense fretboard diagrams with all of the notes on the fretboard and all the enharmonic equivalents (the fancy musical term for notes that sound the same but have a different name). I think these are far too complicated and intimidating for people just trying to take their first steps towards understanding their instrument better.
If you know your barre chord shapes and some different scales, then it would be a great idea to get started with just frets 3, 5, 7 and 9 on the E and A strings. If you can memorise these, then finding all of the others should not be too bad.
3 | 5 | 7 | 9 |
G | A | B | C# |
C | D | E | F# |
If you can memorise these, and understand that the first fret is always one semi-tone higher than the open string (6th string is E, so E1 is F etc) and everything resets from the 12th fret onwards and simple movements like G to G# is on the fourth fret then you will have no problems.
Another way I like to practice this would be to use a metronome or drum loop and try to find every occurrence of a specific note in gradually decreasing subdivisions. You can view my demonstrations of each open string note on the YouTube playlist here.
One thing you cannot do is try to memorise these notes without trying to understand the relationship between all 12 notes in western music. The notes go from A to G, with every note having a # apart from B and E. This works the same for enharmonic equivalents (the name notes but with a different name), so there is no C♭ or F♭.
Remember, there is a semitone between each of these notes below, and each fret on the guitar, bass, ukulele and most other fretted string instruments is also a semitone.
A – A#/B♭ – B – C – C#D♭ – D – D#/E♭ – E – F – F#/G♭ – G – G#/A♭
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, after reading through this blog post, you can understand how useful it is to understand the notes on the fretboard and why it is not that difficult to learn. Referring back to my comment earlier about how this can aid in communication, just imagine how a piano play might feel if you said “oh yeah, play the 6th fret on the B string” – unless that musician has a knowledge of the guitar or quick ears, they will be a little lost! It is way easy, quicker and more efficient to say “play F”.
As a teacher, I have had the privilege of teaching musicians from all walks of life and of all ages. I have actually heard from older players that never tried to understand this idea when they started, and as a result they were embarrassed to admit that. Typically, they are defensive to begin with, but soon opened up and realised massive improvements with the right information. Trust me when I say that it is not too late to start!
How well do you know the notes on the fretboard? See if your guitar teacher can test you in your next lesson, or feel free to test your friends!
