Subject: Memorize the Fingerboard (Part 2)
You are getting this e-mail because you subscribed to it on www.learn-to-play-rock-guitar.com. If you don't want to receive these e-mails any longer, go to the bottom of this message and click on "unsubscribe." Hey there Friend, First off, a little "shout out" to Rush fans and a congratulations - Rush is finally being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame!Alex, Geddy and Neil have been creating interesting, dynamic music together for over 40 years, and there's no sign of them letting up. Alex Lifeson has been on the cover of Guitar Player Magazine at least twice within the last year or so, underscoring his importance as an influential guitarist. Awesome job, guys! Rush official website Back to work! Last time, we talked about beginning to memorize the finger board. I first suggested you memorize the string tunings for standard tuning: E A D G B e. We also talked about the octave for each string, which is located at the twelfth fret. Today I'm going to show you the spacing (or interval) between each consecutive note. By the end, you will hopefully begin to see and recognize some patterns on the guitar neck that will allow you to memorize note locations, and I'll try to point out the obvious patterns as we go. Learn where the notes are and you can easily figure out where scales and chords are played for every key. Scales? Keys? Intervals? OK, I get it, maybe a little too fast. A musical scale is any series of notes played in succession in ascending or descending order. There are many scales, and we'll focus mostly on the major scale for this lesson. I found this cool page that gives you the actual sound wave frequencies of the notes with examples. A musical key is a bit more difficult to explain as it can encompass a lot of different meanings. For our purposes, let's consider the key to be the first note or chord in a scale or progression. Hopefully after we talk a bit about which chords fit in each particular key this will begin to make more sense. As always, if you ever need more clarification, contact me here. An interval is simply the space between two notes, whether you play them separately or at the same time. Here are some rules to help remember how the notes sequence on each string. Some notes have a space of one fret between them. Other notes do not have a space between them, meaning they are played on consecutive frets. On the guitar neck, we can refer to these as whole steps and half-steps. You are merely shifting the location of your finger on the neck. These half-steps and whole steps equate to musical semitones and tones, respectively. Slide your finger up or down one fret and you have gone a half-step - it is increasing or decreasing the pitch by a semitone. Play a note two frets up or down and you have increased or decreased the pitch by a full tone, which is a whole step.
Here are the spaces between each note based on pitch and number of frets. C - D = whole step/tone (2 frets) D - E = whole step/tone (2 frets) E - F = half-step/semi-tone (1 fret) F - G = whole step/tone (2 frets) G - A = whole step/tone (2 frets) A - B = whole step/tone (2 frets) B - C = half-step/semi-tone (1 fret) For example, if you were to play each note on the A string (fifth string), here are the locations of each note on the finger board:  A good exercise for you to do would be this: play each of these notes to familiarize yourself with how they sound played in succession. Then, find these notes on each of the other strings. For example, on the D string (fourth), figure out where each note falls. In fact, I'll start you off with a grid for each string - you fill in the notes. Next time I'll give you the answers so you can see how you did.  You can use Notepad on Windows and TextEdit on a Mac to fill this in. Download the text file here. Right-click this link and choose Save as... If you've read my article on tuning your guitar, you know we can use the fifth fret for tuning strings. This is another trick to help memorize the notes on the fingerboard. Since we know what the open string tuning should be (e B G D A E), we can use the proper intervals between the notes on one string to give us the pitch necessary to tune the next string. But rather than going into the technical music theory behind the intervals, just know this. With standard tuning, the strings are tuned at the perfect fourth interval, which is five semi-tones above the open note of the string. That's five frets up the neck from the string just played open. So if you play the open sixth string (E), and then count up five frets, you have the A note, which is the tuning for the next string A. This same interval works for the fourth, the third and the first strings. The only exception to this rule is the second string. The interval between the G note (third string tuning) and the B note (second string tuning) is called the major third. This is four semi-tones up from the G note, or four frets up the neck on the finger board. Here is what it looks like - notice that the tuning for the B string on the G string is one half-step lower on the neck than on all the other strings.  Another pattern to help you remember notes is to look at where the octave for each note is found. Obviously we've talked about the octave for each open string at the twelfth fret. You can also begin to recognize patterns between the strings to find the octave. For example, look at where the A notes fall on each string:  You'll notice that on strings 6 and 4, the octave is two strings and two frets up. The same works for strings 5 and 3. Here's some examples:  For strings 4 and 2, the octave is two strings and three frets up. Again it's the same for strings 3 and 1.  Filling out more notes reveals that the octave pattern is repeated regardless of the note:  It is also fairly easy to remember notes on strings 5 and 6 because this is where we learn to play our 5 and 6 root barre chords. What do I mean by root 5 or root 6? The root note for the barre chord falls on either the fifth or sixth string. For Example, here is the A barre chord. The A note is on the fifth fret of string 6, so it is a "root 6" barre chord.  The D barre chord is a "root 5" barre chord, because the root note D is at the fifth fret on string 5.  These patterns may or may not help you. A lot of it depends on how you learn. Some people will do fine with just rote memorization, while others will find these visual diagrams helpful. Still others will remember by feel, the muscles remembering the location of each note. The key is figuring out which techniques work for you. It's not a race to see how fast you can memorize the finger board, so take you time and have fun with it. If one technique just isn't getting you the results you're after, try something else. Or come up with your own trick to help you remember where the notes are. Next time we'll look at all the major notes on the finger board, and maybe we'll get a little 'cray cray' (as my teenage daughters would put it) and expand on the whole 'sharps and flats' issue. Until then... Peace~ Dave Dave "Eddie" Vance is a rock guitar enthusiast and gear nut. He has been playing guitar for over 30 years and enjoys tormenting the neighbors every chance he gets. When he's not slaving for the man, you can find him rocking out with his B.C. Rich Bich guitar, a cold beer and some sweet tunes. He also runs Learn-To-Play-Rock-Guitar.com, but you knew that already! Follow Learn To Play Rock Guitar:I welcome your feedback! Did you like today's message? What other topics would you like to see covered in my e-mails? 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