Repeat YourselfįIGURE 3 (above) diagrams the guitar’s five middle Cs on five different strings. Now, let’s start breaking down this giant clusterfuck and find out what’s really going on here.

The grid illustrated in FIGURE 2 (above) fills in the holes in FIGURE 1 with all of the missing accidentals, completing the “big picture.” A sharp (#) raises a note by one half-step, while a flat (b) lowers it a half-step.Įnharmonic notes occur when two different accidentals are used to indicate the same pitch, i.e., A#=Bb, C#=Db, D#=Eb, F#=Gb and G#=Ab. The remaining five tones within any octave (an increment of 12 half-steps) are annotated using accidentals, or sharp and flat symbols. Now, what about all those empty spaces? 3. Granted, that’s a lot of notes to memorize, but the first thing to remember is that unless you change tunings, every note’s address is permanent. Placed on a full fingerboard grid, or matrix, the natural notes manifest as shown in FIGURE 1 (above). Many traditional beginner methods cover notes up to the 3rd or 5th fret, but above that, we are essentially left to our own devices. Map the TerritoryĬompare the guitar fingerboard to a piano keyboard, the birthplace of music theory, and you’ll find that while the keyboard separates natural notes and accidentals (sharps and flats – more on those in a minute) into tidy white and black keys that lie along a horizontal plane and repeat every octave, the guitar offers no such easy path to note recognition.

C flat major scale g major scale