10 steps to fretboard

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10 Steps to Learn the Guitar Fretboard for total beginners

It goes without saying that once you learn the guitar fretboard, life as a guitarist will be easier in every way.

Yet, most guitarists never really learn the damn thing. Whether out of laziness or lack of system, and with a heck of a lot of excuses to back them up, they just never get down to it.

This getting-started guide will help you lay a strong foundation. Once you go through it thoroughly you will be miles ahead of most...

There is a lot to say about the fretboard. Truly mastering it is no mean feat. But you will never do it if you don't start with a system that makes sense. These 10 basic steps to learn the guitar fretboard will change your status from total beginner to beginner-with-a-future in just a few days.

Before we jump into it...

If you're starting to play guitar, then you have an awesome opportunity before you: to start out the right way, from the beginning. Is you do this, you will save yourself years trying to correct bad habits. If you start out in the right direction, you will learn very quickly! But the greatest advantage you have right now is that you don't think you know everything: you don’t think you have “nothing to learn”...

It’s also a risky moment, because there is lots and lots of information on playing guitar out there —way too much, actually. Sadly, most of it is of questionable quality, at best. It's very easy getting lost in that jungle, and ending up starting in a way that may not be very ef!cient. It’s easy to fall for a “learn quick” pitch that leads to a dead end.

This could later cost you painful years correcting ingrained habits... habits regarding how you understand music, and music through the guitar; muscular habits, hearing habits, musical thought habits... (yes, you do have to think in order to be a musician!).

So it's very important to do things right from the very start! You don't have any time to lose, and you can’t really start from scratch more than once, can you?


3 key points

One thing needs to be clear from the start: when learning to play guitar —or any other instrument— you need to divide your study time between three very distinct, though interconnected aspects of your project:

These points are arranged in order of importance: 1 determines 2 and 2 determines 3; yet, in practice, it's best to work in an integrative way. Otherwise the learning process becomes either too practice-focused, with little understanding, or too abstract. If you !nd the right balance, you will save yourself years, and enjoy yourself while you’re at it!!!

The main focus of both Fretboard Essentials and this getting-started guide is point 1: if you have a solid basic understanding of music theory as it applies to the fretboard, all the rest will fall neatly into place when it comes time to work on it.

1. KNOWING THE INSTRUMENT AND ITS POSSIBILITIES —the fretboard is the same regardless of style, right?

2. GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF TECHNIQUE —what's the most efficient way of interacting with the guitar?

3. STYLE SPECIFICS —what style do I want to play, and how does that relate to the first two points? What about style-specific techniques?


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6 strategies

Yes, learning the fretboard is hard. No serious guitar player I know has ever said otherwise. But don’t make it harder than it has to be by just ignoring it.

This is what most do: they completely ignore the principles that underly fretboard layout, focusing only on fingering patterns.

1. Know thy enemy

Ok, it may be a little far-fetched to call the fretboard an enemy. But you get the point. The better you understand the fretboard, the better armed you will be. As a musician.

So don’t be lazy about it!

2. Break it down

Learning the fretboard is a huge, potentially daunting project. Break it down into bite-sized morsels, to the point at which you are in full control of whatever it is you’re doing. Then add one more layer. Rinse and repeat.

3. Learn the rules of the game

The fretboard is not infinite. It is a grid, just like a chessboard, with well defined rules. Paradoxically, the best way to find freedom, on the fretboard, is to learn all the rules of the game. You can only break or bend a rule once you know it!

4. The smart route

Most people attempt the short route: learn a few scales and patterns.

Some attempt the long route: learn all the scales and patterns (as if that were even possible).

Few undertake the smart route: understand the rules of the game.

5. It’s not the notes, it’s what you can do with them

Knowing the names of the notes on every fret and every string is useless. It’s what you

can do with those notes that counts. For that you need to understand the relationships between those notes.

1. Know thy enemy

2. Break it down

3. Learn the rules of the game

4. The smart route

5. It’s not the notes, it’s what you can do with them

6. Get out of the forest


6. Get out of the forest

If you’re in the forest, all the trees will look the same to you. Try walking around a bit, and you’re likely to get lost. But if you’re out of the forest for long enough, looking at it from a mountain top, you will get to see its over-all layout.

What the hell have trees got to do with the guitar fretboard, you ask?

If you are working out your favorite song by ear, reading tab, chord diagrams, or even sheet music, you will get lost because all the frets look just the same.

The guitar is not like the piano where you have white and black keys. Maybe that would help, but this is not the point.

The point is that before you plunge into all the details, it is wise to take an overview of the terrain. Think reconnaissance. Think cartography... Haphazard exploration may be fun, and that is the way we all get started. But it is not likely to lead too far.

You have to think about notes, not just frets, simply because frets are all the same!!!

Notes, however, have very special relationships to one another. If you understand those, you will be in a much better position when it comes to "navigating" around the fretboard.

So stop looking at your chord charts, scale diagrams, tabs, staves, or whatever it is for a second. Ok, maybe you need a few hours, or months, or years... Take some time to reflect on notes, their relationships to one another, and how these are reflected on the fretboard.

If you do that, I guarantee you will start spotting patterns. You will start to see symmetry. And all of a sudden, the guitar fretboard diagram will become clear to you. You will not need to memorize anything, or need to repeat patterns up and down the guitar neck.


Why is learning the fretboard such a pain?

Why is the guitar fretboard so hard to memorize?

Let's take a look at the keyboard: if you think about the keyboard, and what makes it so easy to learn, its obvious:

The farther to the right, the higher the pitch.

The farther to the left, the lower the pitch.

You only have a single rule to learn. UP, or DOWN. Learn the note names, and that's that!

(Ok, that’s not enough to be an Oscar Peterson or an Arthur Rubinstein, but the fact that the piano is a single axis instrument makes it easy to understand in a visual way).

One string at a time...

If the guitar only had one string, then it would be as easy to play as the piano:

The farther to the right you move, the higher the pitch

The farther to the left you move, the lower the pitch

Again, there is only one simple rule to this game: so far so good...


2 axes?!

As you well know, the guitar has 6 strings, not 1. While you could think of the guitar as 6 instruments in one, the possibilities of all 6 combined are way more interesting!!!

This means that you can go up, and you can go down on 2 different axes.

Remember plotting charts in math class? X and Y axes? Same thing...

Hold on... It gets worse!!!

Yes, you heard right... it gets worse. Learning the guitar fretboard is as hard as it is not really because it is six instruments in one but because it's freaking asymmetrical!

Think about other stringed instruments like the violin, the viola, the cello, the double-bass, or the mandolin... violin players have never complained about how hard it is to learn the notes on their fingerboard.

The reason is that all those instruments, along with the bass-guitar, use symmetrical tuning systems: The interval between each pair of strings is the same.

But the guitar is the ugly duckling in the family of stringed instruments: the interval between each pair of contiguous strings is a perfect fourth, with the exception of the second and third strings, which are tuned a major third apart.

Down to business:

Now you know why the guitar fretboard is so hard to learn. Understanding this is a great starting point. And believe me, I'm with you if you feel frustrated by it! I know I was, for years!!!

That is the reason I wrote Fretboard Essentials: to help you out. I want you to get straight to the interesting things, and skip all the frustration.



The 10 Steps1. Stop feeling confused about it: just do it!

2. Divide a string in half to get the octave

3. Only 12 tones

4. The 12 tones are a cycle

5. Intervals between strings

6. Major scales

7. Say the names of the notes you play

8. Sing everything you play

9. Visualize everything in your mind’s eye

10. Integrate music theory and ear training to your study of the fretboard


1. Stop feeling confused about it: just do it!As a beginner, I always saw the guitar fretboard as a mystery. To be quite honest, years went by before I even started thinking about it seriously: the damn thing just seemed so obscure.

My teachers were of no great help, either. From where I stood, they didn't seem to be much better off than myself in that regard. They didn't really seem to understand the guitar fretboard at all. And they didn't! Even though they were top notch classical guitarists!!! (Or if they did, they never shared what they knew).

So I took it for granted that there really was no better way. Fortunately for me, my musical curiosity went well beyond the guitar. My !rst instrument as a child was actually the piano...

I later studied bowed strings: learning to play cello and violin changed my whole perspective on stringed instruments. It showed me a whole different level of musical understanding was indeed possible.

I decided that there had to be a better way of learning the guitar fretboard. Now I knew that it was possible to understand one's instrument in depth. I also knew that it was possible to understand music, through one's instrument.

So this leads us back the the matter at hand. Before getting too speci!c about the guitar fretboard layout, let's talk about something a lot more basic: mood. Just stop that crappy “I’m confused, this is so damn hard” mood. Today!

If someone had told me this then, I would not have paid any attention. But I now know that feeling confused is just a mood. And as with all moods, all that is required to break out of it is decision.

By simply deciding not to feel confused about the fretboard, you will start to see changes. Of course, this has to be reinforced through actual understanding.

And understanding is only achieved through study. But mood is the secret key to unlock that door. The simple decision to be clear-headed about this will turn learning the fretboard into a rewarding and exciting adventure.



2. Divide a string in half to get the octaveThis is true of any stringed instrument. The ancient Greeks had heaps of fun playing around with monochords —single stringed instruments— and discovered this and many

other basic facts of acoustics, which are now at the foundation of our musical system.

What is an octave, you ask? An octave is a specific interval —or “distance” — between

two notes. The way to know the name of an interval is to count the letters:

If you go up a major or a minor scale and count 8 “notches”, you get an octave. (More on major and minor scales in Step 6).

Back to our string. If you halve the vibrating portion of a string, without changing its tension or anything else, the note you get when you pluck it or bow it is an octave above the note you get when you pluck the open string.

Guitars are handy in that they have frets: if you count up to fret 12 of any string, that distance is exactly half the string. If this is not the case with your guitar, then feel free to use it as firewood or as a projectile ;-)

Wait! Didn’t I just say 8, not 12?! The reason for this is that the frets of a guitar are not divided into white and black, like the keys of a piano.

If you count up using only the white keys —C major—, you need 8 steps to get to the octave. If you count up using white and black keys, however, you need 12 steps before you get to the octave. Just like a guitar!

The scale you get when you play 12 contiguous frets on a guitar, or the white and black keys of a piano is called a chromatic scale (more on chromatic scales in Step 3).

C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C1-2-3-4 -5 -6 -7 -8

Play and sing an open string, and then that same string with your finger on fret 12.

Try to get a feel for what an octave is. If you can’t do it with that string, attempt the exercise with an other one.


3. Only 12 tonesThe number of possible notes is infinite. The number of tones, however, on a guitar or a piano is limited to 12. Yes, you read right: there are only 12 different tones to choose from when making music on a guitar or a piano.

If you find that limiting, switch to trombone, voice or violin...

These 12 tones all occur within the “space” of an octave:

If you play all 12 tones in order, you get what is called a chromatic scale. On a guitar, the 12 tones of a chromatic scale are all right next to each other in any same-string succession of 12 frets.

4. The 12 tones are a cycleThe 12 tones happen to be a cycle. If you keep going after tone 12, tone 13 will be a C, just like tone 1, albeit a higher pitched C. To distinguish one C from another, we use a system of index numbers.

C5 is middle C (in all countries except for America, where C4 is middle C). C6 is C one octave above middle C, and C4 is C one octave below middle C, and so on and so forth, ad infinitum...

This will also be true for any other scales you play: they are cycles that repeat at every octave.

C C♯/D♭ D D♯/E♭ E/F♭ E♯/F F♯/G♭ G G♯/A♭ A A♯/B♭ B

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Take the open string you found most comfortable in the exercise in Step 2. Now play and sing the 12 tones going up, fret by fret.

Now join the exercises in Step 2 and Step 3 by going beyond the 12 tones, to include the note one octave above the note of the open string you chose.


5. Intervals between stringsYou now have some basic understanding of the !rst axis: along the strings. The next step is to take a look at the second axis: across the strings.In Step 2 we de!ned interval as the auditive “distance” between two notes. So let’s take a look at the intervals between the different strings:

As you can see, the interval between strings 3 and 2 just screws everything up ;-)

If you’re not sure what I mean by “everything”, I mean symmetry. If it weren’t for that fricking major third, every single goddam !ngering pattern you could think of would be exactly the same, all over the fretboard...

Using the standard tuning system, you have to change your !ngering patterns to compensate for the different “auditive distances” between the strings.

Ok, that was my rant. Let’s now focus on understanding this stuff, so that this lack of symmetry is less of an obstacle to you...

B - c - d - E : a perfect fourth

2 1

G - a - B : a major third

3 2

D - e - f - G : a perfect fourth

4 3

A - b - c - D : a perfect fourth

5 4

E - f - g - A : a perfect fourth

6 5

Play and sing the notes of each pair of contiguous open strings, one at a time. Do it going upward and also going downward, across strings, on axis 2.

If you !nd it hard to sing in tune at the beginning, don’t despair... this comes with time. The reason to sing, as you will !nd out in Step 8 is to engage more of your senses, more deeply, in your explorations of the guitar.

Do everything you can to make this experience as intense and meaningful to you as possible. Avoid “studying guitar while checking Facebook”, or “while watching TV”, or whatever. It just can’t be done, not with the degree of concentration needed to take your playing where you want it to go.

If you !nd it hard to dedicate much time to your explorations of the guitar, then it’s far better to do it for 5 minutes, in a focused way, than to do it for hours, with something else in your head at the same time...

So far you have understood basic note layout both along each of the strings, and across the fretboard: the 2 axes of note distribution...


6. Major scalesThe scale you learned in Step 2, the chromatic scale, you practiced for one simple reason: to understand note layout along axis 1. It’s now time to take this one step further and look at major scales...

Every single scale-type has a set distribution of tones within it. A scale is nothing but a selection of certain tones within the octave. Each pair of neighboring tones is divided by a speci!c interval. This interval pattern repeats at each octave, no matter how high or low you go.

The most common scale-types contain either 5 or 7 tones. For now, we will focus on a the most common of the 7-tone scales: the major scale.

Each neighboring pair of notes of the major scale is divided by either a half-tone or a whole-tone. But let’s not get too deep into the fancy names of things for now:

Let’s just say that each neighboring pair of notes of the major scale are either right next to each other, as in the !rst picture above, or have an empty fret between them, as in the second picture.

Lets call the !rst interval 1 and the second 2. The interval pattern for the full major scale, closing an octave above the starting note, is:

2 - 2 - 1 - 2 - 2 - 2 - 1

This means that if you start your scale on any open string of your choosing, these are the frets you will have to use to play a major scale:

0 2 4 5 7 9 11 12


7. Say the names of the notes you playYou now have absorbed the sound of some of the basic building blocks of music. The next step is know the names of the notes you’ve just used.

Of course, saying “f-sharp” takes too long, so these are the syllables used for sharp notes:

Upward:C C♯ D D♯ E F F♯ G G♯ A A♯ B

Do DI Re RI Mi Fa FI Sol SI La LI Ti

Likewise, saying “a-"at” won’t do, so we say the names of "attened notes thusly:

Downward: C C♭ B♭ A A♭ G G♭ F F♭ E♭ D D♭ Do DE TE La LE Sol SE Fa FE ME Re RA

Play and sing a major scale starting on each of the open strings. Don’t worry too much about technique or smoothness in the beginning. Just keep it simple and focus on the scale itself.

Play and sing going up, and going down as well... do so until you can do it "uidly, and the sound of the major scale is ingrained into your mind, along with its. interval pattern.

This will be the basis for most, if not all, of the music theory that you will layer on top of your new-found knowledge of guitar fretboard basics...

Apply this principle to all the exercises you’ve done so far. In the case of chromatic scales, use the “sharp names” when going upward, and the “"at names” when coming back down.When singing major scales, you will need to count to !gure out the names of the notes for each string. E major, for instance, would be:

E F♯ G♯ A B C♯ D♯ E

Mi Fi Si La Ti Di Ri MiIn the case of major scales, you use the same names going up and coming down. Work out the syllables for the major scales on the remaining open strings and practice them!

It is important not only to “get it” in terms of sound, but also to have a name for every element of music that you use. That’s the importance of this step...


8. Sing everything you playWhether you are playing an idea of your own or something you worked out by ear or read, sing it. This will engage your sense of hearing at a far deeper level. It will help you grasp the fretboard intuitively.

If you’re shy, this might be hard, but believe me, it’s worth it. This tip alone will teach you the biggest skill in music: LISTENING! If you don’t listen to what you play, at the deepest level possible, your playing will always be limited. This is the only way to really take your playing where you want to.

This doesn’t mean ALWAYS sing... just make it a habit to practice your ideas and the music you play this way too. If you want to take this one step further, record yourself. Then listen back and !x what needs !xing.

Another great idea is to sing everything you play using the syllables you learned in Step 7. This will further cement your knowledge of where each note is on the fretboard.

9. Visualize everything in your mind’s eyeForm a clear mental picture of each of these exercises —and any other exercises and music you play—, and picture yourself going over all the steps. Practice this for 5 minutes a day, until the image is sharp and clear.

This is the best way to make the fretboard —and music— completely yours. Once you get real good, you’ll be able to practice, and invent stuff that you can play without needing to have a guitar at hand.

This will also make your knowledge completely !rm and “leak-proof”, galvanizing your self-con!dence when you play on-stage or record something with professional musicians...

If you !nd this super-hard at !rst, don’t panic! Do it for as long as you can while keeping the image —and sound— perfectly sharp in your head. Then little by little stretch that time. The ability to concentrate you will develop will help you with everything, not just music and the guitar.

You may soon !nd yourself playing guitar in your dreams. This is really cool! It means all this info is really seeping down to where it has to go: your subconscious mind. Then, it will be second nature with you to create awesome music, just like that!


10. Integrate music theory & ear training You’re probably dying to take all of this one step further. If you liked this approach, and find that it helps you, I recommend you check out my book, Fretboard Essentials, a practical guitar theory and ear training guide for beginners.

Fretboard Essentials is just like this 10 step guide, except that it goes deeper: it has heaps of unique diagrams and tons of exercises... so that you can take it all in, one step at a time.

Click here to purchase Fretboard Essentials


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10 Steps to Learn the Guitar Fretboard© 2011 Alexander Cortés

All rights reserved worldwide.

No part of this publication may be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, or reproduced in any way, including

but not limited to digital copying and printing.

The author, Alexander Cortés has made his best effort to produce a high quality, informative, and helpful book, but

he makes no representation or warranties of any kind with regard to the completeness or accuracy of the contents of

the book. He accepts no liability of any kind for any losses or damages caused or alleged to be caused,

directly or indirectly, from using the information contained in this book.


10 steps to fretboard

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