How to memorise every note on the guitar

Learning the notes on your guitar is crucial if you want to progress as a guitarist or a musician. Guitarists are unique, as many of us learn first through tablature, using numbers to learn how to play the instrument. However this can hold you back when working with other musicians, or when learning songs from other forms of music notation.

STEP 1 - UNDERSTAND WHAT A NOTE IS

This one seems obvious, but I have seen some confusion among guitarists who mistake terms like ‘minor’ and ‘major’ for a note. A note is simply a single letter, that may have a sharp (#) or a flat (♭) next to it (there will be more on this in the following steps). This letter represents a pitch, that then links to a fret on your guitar. The frets are the gaps between the fret bars that you put your fingers on to get a different sound.

STEP 2 - LEARN THE NAMES OF THE NOTES

There are 12 notes on your guitar. They are:

A, A# or B♭, B, C, C# or D♭, D, D# or E♭, E, F, F# or G♭, G, G# or A♭

The # stands for SHARP

The ♭ stands for FLAT

Sometimes seeing this sequence on a piano can help you to visualise how this works out.

Practice saying the sequence out loud and then write all 12 notes out by memory 5 times.

STEP 3 - Play this SEQUENCE while saying the note names ON THE E and A STRINGS

There is something about saying these notes out loud that helps get the sequence into your head.

Starting on the A strings:

the open string is A, First FRET is A# or B♭, second fret is B, third fret is C and so on…

Then Jump to the E string:

the open string is E, First FRET is F, second fret is F# or G♭, third fret is G and so on…

MEMORISE THE 3rd, 5th & 7th FRETS ON THE E and A Strings

Next we need to speed up the time it takes to FIGURE OUT where a note is on the guitar. THE first thing to do is to memorise the 3rd, 5th and 7th fret names on the E and A strings.

Say it out loud, write it down, play the fret, whatever you need to do get it in your head!

On the E string -

And then on the A String, do the same thing -

Memorising these 6 notes will speed everything up, for instance if you want to play a C#, you can now look at the C (3rd fret on the A string) and then go up a note. Or if you need an A# you instantly jump to the 5th fret on the E string (which is an A) and then move up one fret.

Practice some RAndom note challenges and see how quickly you can find them on those two strings.

FINALLY, ONCE YOU HAVE DONE ALL THAT, LEARN THIS SEQUENCE

The next sequence will allow you to find all the notes of the same name everywhere on the guitar.

FIRST DO IT IN THE KEY of G, UP AND DOWN THE GUITAR:

Then ONCE YOU Have this memorised, Try it in every key (AGAIN Back and FORTH). Here it is in the Key of A:

HOPEFULLY THIS IS ALL MAKING SENSE AND YOU ARE STARTING TO NAVIGATE AROUND THE FRETBOARD KNOWING THE NOTES YOU ARE PLAYING.

NOW TEST YOURSELF WITH RANDOM NOTES

So the way to get super quick at this is to tie the two main things you’ve learnt together. Firstly from now on, whenever you want to FIND a note, you can relate everything back to the E or A string.

For INSTANCE If you are trying to figure out a note on the B string, use the sequence you just learnt to navigate back up to the E STRING.

AS AN EXAMPLE IF YOU WERE TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHAT the notes on the 8th and 6th FRET ARE ON THE B STRING, this is how you would do it…

This will also work when trying to figure out notes on the G string. For instance if you are trying to find the 6th and 8th frets on the G String, this is how you would do it…