Category Archives: All Lessons

Guitar lessons with a focus on theory and understanding the music that you are playing.

Lesson 1: Numbering The Guitar Strings

Note: It is not strictly necessary to follow this numbering method in order to follow my other lessons. You can skip this lesson if you want and the rest of the lessons will still make sense.

Jimi Hendrix

One of the things that always bugged me when I first started playing the guitar was how the guitar strings are numbered. In case you don’t know the conventional order that guitar strings are counted in is: low E = 6, A = 5, D = 4, G = 3, B = 2 and high E = 1. But I can’t find any good reason for why it is done in this way. It is confusing and counter intuitive yet everyone just goes along with it since that’s always the way it has been done.

That’s just not good enough for me and that’s why here at GTR all lessons and resources count the strings in the following way:

Low E = 1, A = 2, D = 3, G = 4, B = 5 and High E = 6.

Now is a good time to memorise the note names of the strings if you don’t already know them. You can use the following sentence to remember them easily:

Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears.

I know that everyone else counts in the other way but it wouldn’t be much of a guitar theory revolution if I did things in the same old ways. But I’m not doing this just to be difficult or different. There are several reason for why I think this is a better way of doing it.

First of all, in all other areas of music a lower pitch is given the lower number. This is the case with both scales and chords for example. Next, the strings that you hit first when strumming or on which scales tend to start are those closest to your face when holding the guitar. It only makes sense to start counting at strings that are closest to you.

Lastly, the fingers on both hands are usually numbered 1 to 4 from the index finger to the little finger when indicating where to place your fingers on the fretboard and when plucking strings with your strumming / plucking hand. In both cases the lower numbered fingers are touching the lower numbered strings the majority of the time.

Remember that the main inspiration behind this site is to clear away all the stupid and silly conventional ways of teaching and learning music theory for the guitar. I’ve been playing guitar for more than a decade and I can’t tell you how confused I was when I first started. I didn’t realize that some of the standard ways in which things are presented just aren’t that good. It’s no wonder so many people get confused and give up on learning music theory.

On this site I challenge some very basic assumption and question the dogma presented by so many guitar players and teachers. I encourage you to adopt this numbering method and spread it amongst your guitar playing friends so we can make learning to play the guitar easier for everyone.

Learning The Notes On The Guitar Fretboard

video

If you want help with this lesson then check out the accompanying free e-book: “Learning The Guitar Notes” in which I show you some amazing tricks that will help you learn the fretboard in days.

Most guitar players realize they need to put some effort into learning the guitar notes on the fretboard at some point.

However most become overwhelmed by the seeming effort it will take to learn so many notes and think it will be a difficult task to accomplish.

There are plenty of resources out there saying they can teach you how to learn all the notes on the fretboard. Unfortunately they are mostly terrible.

The fact is that it is much easier to learn all the notes on the guitar fretboard. You just need to know about a secret pattern that not many people are aware of. When you know this pattern it will make learning the 288 positions (if your guitar goes up to 24 frets) much easier than you may think. It will cut down the time you need to memorize all the notes to a matter of days, not weeks or months. (By the way if you want a visual aid in the form of diagrams for this lesson, then download the free e-book).

So first of all we can cut the number of notes that need to be learned in half because the guitar fretboard repeats after the 12th fret (the first 12 frets are the first octave, the next 12 are the second octave). So the notes appear in the same order from the 12th fret to the 24th fret as they do from the 1st fret to the 12th fret. Now you only 144 note locations to learn.

In case you don’t know total there are 12 different notes used in Western music, these are: C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/, A, A#/Bb and B.

Note that the #’s and b’s (sharps and flats) are between the other notes C and D, D and E, F and G, G and A, A and B. This means we can also cut out these notes. Now we are only left with 42 because we will easily see the sharps and flats appear between the other notes once we’ve learned the positions of the notes C, D, E, F, G and A.

Now find a diagram of all the notes on the fretboard (for example there is one in the free e-book that you get when you join the Guitar Theory Revolution newsletter) and look at the Universal Note Pattern . Ever note follows this pattern. Because between the 1st fret and the 12th fret each note appears only once on each of the six guitar strings. So if you take the start of the pattern to be the notes appearing on the low and high E string then you’ll see the pattern repeat over and over for each note.

Getting to know this note pattern is the quickest and easiest way to learn all the notes on the guitar fretboard. As I said before it is best to concentrate on the notes C, D, E, F, G, A and B because that means you’ll eventually automatically see the sharp and flat notes between them.

Also you should always try to sing or hum the notes that you are playing because it helpes to improve your ability to recognize notes by ear.

Finally make sure you learn the locations of the notes independently to other notes. Although it can be helpful to use other notes as a reference, it’s best to know each note ‘cold’. The Universal Note Pattern is hands down the most important pattern you can learn as a guitar player, it will help you learn all the notes on the guitar, help you learn the CAGED system easily and will help you easily learn scales like the Major, Minor and Pentatonic scales. When you learn all the notes on the guitar you’ll be streets ahead of 90% of other guitar players.

If you want help with this lesson then check out accompanying the free e-book: “Learning The Guitar Notes” in which I show you some amazing tricks that will help you learn the fretboard in days.