Notes on the Guitar
This lesson will teach you the basic notes in the first position (The first four frets of the guitar). For the complete fretboard see Learn the Guitar Neck in 10 Easy Lessons.
Notes on the Staff
Every note has a name that comes from the musical alphabet, A to G. But many notes share the same name, there are many Es and Fs,
some high and some low. This is because they sound similiar. For instance when a woman sings an A and a man sings an A we recognize them as the same pitch, even though the woman's is higher.
The staff consists of five lines which tell us the names of the notes. It does NOT tell us where they are on the guitar. Take a look at the staff. The funny thing at the beginning is called a clef. It was originally the letter G, but people fancied it up. See how it makes a target? That's a G. Now if you go up or down one spot on the staff you are simply moving up or down one spot in the musical alphabet. If you go down to the space below you get an F, and if you move to the space above G you get an A. Why? Again the musical alphabet goes from A to G, so when you move above G you start over again.
An easy way to remeber the names of the notes is with two memory tricks.
- The notes on the Spaces spell the word face
- The notes on the lines are the first letters to the sentence: Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge (or Every Good Boy Does Fine)
For notes above and below the staff follow the alphabet. Remeber that the staff follows the musical alphabet, and follow them down.
Activities
Play Note Squish to learn the note names on the staff. Learn to recognize the notes FAST!- Play Note Fish to learn them even better! (I know, I know, come up with more original titles.)
The Open Strings
Warning: More Silly Memory Tricks Ahead!
Let's learn the names of the open strings on the guitar. They are E A D G B E, from low to high. To remeber it use the sentence: Elephants and Donkeys Grow Big Ears.
Activities
- Play the open strings on the guitar as you say their name.
- Play the open strings as you say: Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears.
- Draw your own Elephant and Donkey. (Really it will help your memory. I know its silly, but it works!)
The Bee
Once upon a time in a musical land the music alphabet made sense. There was one of each letter A to G, and in between each letter was a sharp. It looked like this “A A# B B# C C# D D# E E# F F# G G#.” The notes were kept in a fortress and looked as beautiful as they sounded. One day an evil bee decided he wanted to steal the letters to his name, “B”, “B#”, “E” and “E#,” in order to make a monument to himself. He climbed the castle wall and put the “B” in his bag. Little did he know, that his buzzing would wake King Muzo. The King awoke and caught Bee by his stinger. “Bee” he said, “It is not good to make one’s name appear bigger than it really is. Take Brittney Spears for example…” . He gave Bee a great punishment. “I shall take B# and E# right out of the alphabet for ever.” And that is just what he did. To this day our musical alphabet reads “A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G#”.
A A# B C C# D D# E F F# G G#
There is no B or E sharp. So what? Well watch this. Each piece of the musical alphabet (“A A# B C C#…”) corresponds to one fret. The open fifth string is “A”. Look at the musical alphabet shown above, and find “A.” Immediately following A in the musical alphabet is “A#.” Therefore the first fret is “A#”. The second fret is “B”, the third “C”, the fourth “C#”, the fifth “D”, and on and on up the post-bee musical alphabet.
That's it. You now have the tools to find the notes in the first position by name. Just go to the open string (Elephants and Donkeys Grow Big Ears) and move up the musical alphabet to find the note for any fret.
