Learning the Notes On the Neck.

Learning the notes on the fretboard is essential for most serious guitarists. Strangely it seems like one of the things most commonly left till last to learn. The sad thing is, so many guitarists spend so much effort in finding strategies for coping with the fact that they don't know all the notes, when with a fraction of that time and effort, they could just learn them.

Why is knowing the notes so important?

If you are in one part of the neck and you've found your way there by ear, how would you quickly find your way if you were to jump up the neck to a higher position. Perhaps by connecting visual patterns of scale shapes? How free can your movements be, before you get lost and have to return to your original position? What if you want to jump up the neck on a different string... do you dare risk it?

Why limit yourself like this? Why make your ear work so hard on finding the right notes, when you could be using it to choose WHICH notes out of the ones you KNOW will work. Taking the guess work out of it gives you more control, more choice, allows you to move your ear to another level.

If you are planning to play over chord changes, attempting this without knowing the notes, is like finding your way round the room with the lights out. Why not just switch them on?

Is there an easy way to learn the notes?

Yes.

The important things to remember are:

Don't count up the notes sequentially in order to find them.

Don't use the octave shapes to find the notes either.

You need to find each note in a single mental step. So counting from C past D in order to find E is too many mental steps.

Here's a method that works really quickly (takes most people a couples of weeks if they work consistently on it).

Remember, that once you get up to the 12th fret and beyond, the fretboard just repeats itself. So if you know where the notes are up to the 12th fret, you'll know them beyond the 12th as well.

First learn where all the B's are. With the B's you get a visual block of four notes that always appear together as follows:

EF
BC

So a semitone above a B you get a C, on the next string up (in pitch) just above the B and C on the same frets, you get E and F. You can see this as a visual block of four notes. This means that in one mental step, you can find 4 notes. This single mental step is important. Remember, don't use you knowledge of where other notes are to find these BC,EF blocks. Just learn where they are without reference to anything other than the dots on the fretboard. That includes not using one block of BC,EF to find another.

Note that when you cross from the G to the B string, the tuning is a major 3rd between these strings, where as its a 4th between all the others. This means that all visual patterns that cross cross the G and B strings have to be moved up a fret on the B string. This is of course true not just for visual patterns of where the notes are, but all scale arpegeo and interval patterns as well. Just think of everything on the B and high E string as being moved up one fret from the rest of the strings.

Once you've learned these (and it shouldn't take long if you stick to it), learn where all the A's are. Above every A there is a D on the next string up (in pitch) on the same fret (but see above paragraph). So from learning the A's you have the D's as well.

D
A

This only leaves the G's. Most people find that once they've learned the rest of the notes, its pretty easy to see where the G's are. But I recommend you learn where they are without reference to the other notes.

Once the notes are learned, what many people find is that if they don't use them, they start to forget them. So when you've learned them, you MUST start using them all the time. One problem is, that because people are used to playing without knowing where the notes are, even once they've learned them, they don't use this new knowledge. So its very important to make use of them right away. You'll find, that once you actually start using the notes, they will become a permanent part of your memory.

Here are some exercises to get you using the notes.

1) Put on some backing music in a particular key. We'll take for this example the key of A, but you should repeat this exercise for all the notes/keys. Solo over the backing. Start by finding a A on the G string beyond the 12th fret, stay in that position for a while, then find an A on the B string behind the 12th fret and continue soloing from there. Again after a while, find an A on the E string above the 12th fret, then after a few bars move to an A on the D string below the 12th fret etc... The object, is to move up and down the neck as much as possible when you change position. This is important because it means you can't fall back on relative visual cues like octave shapes etc...

2) Put a chord progression on tape or sequencer that doesn't fall into a familiar pattern, in other words choose a set of chords that don't fit obviously into one key. The progression should contain 7 to 10 different chords. Play over the tape or sequencer. As each chord arrives, move to the root note of the chord and if possible play a scale (eg: a mode) that will fit with the type of chord (eg: minor, major etc...), but don't worry if you can't play the scale (unless you're a jazz player in which case you should be worried if you can't!). If playing over lots of chord changes is not part of your style, then perhaps just play the root of the chord and the 5th. As this exercise gets easier, do it again but move to opposite ends of the neck for each chord. Finally do it while staying within the same four fret area of the neck for example, from the 9th to the 12th frets, then do this repeatedly until you've covered all areas of the neck.

3) When you are soloing in everyday playing situations and you want to move up or down the neck in order to play higher or lower notes, don't use the E string or scale shape to find your new pattern. Choose the area of the neck you want to move to roughly, then look for the root note on what ever string it appears in that area of the neck, and play from there. This is in fact how people who know the notes, actually move around the neck. As you probably know (or you wouldn't be reading this), using scale shapes to move up or down the neck is dangerous, its just too easy to loose your place. So use your new skill of knowing the notes instead, that's one of the things its for after all.