How to learn the notes on the fretboard
Beginner Guitar Essentials Lesson 11
This series of lessons will set you up for success on the guitar. You’ll learn what to focus on as a beginner, what to ignore, and how to structure your practice so you can start using what you’re learning to play songs as quickly as possible!
Learning the notes on the fretboard
Being able to recognise the notes on the fretboard is like the difference between watching a movie in black and white vs in colour. Sure, you could watch it in black and white and get a sense of the story. But seeing things in colour adds a whole dimension to what you're seeing and allows you to appreciate what you are seeing in entirely new ways.
Learning the fretboard is easy and can be done in as little as 30-seconds per day.
To do this, call out a random note from the diagram below and THEN play it.
A lot of students end up calling out a note and playing it at the same time when they try this exercise.
Don’t do this.
Call out the note and THEN begin moving your hand to play it.
Resist the temptation to do both at the same time.
The Musicians Guide to Fretboard Memorisation
If you carefully follow the strategy I’ve outlined in this lesson and practice every day, you’ll have mastered the notes on the fretboard in one to three months. If you’re thinking about learning the notes on the fretboard, you probably want to enjoy playing the guitar for the rest of your life. A few months is nothing to develop a skill that is going to maximise your enjoyment of every other aspect of your guitar playing.
If you feel like you don’t have the knowledge or motivation to do this on your own, click the button below and I’ll walk through it with you step-by-step.
Enjoying the lessons?
This series of lessons is test footage from the first part of our upcoming beginner guitar course. These lessons are all from the first of 10 sections that will help you form a rock-solid foundation when you’re starting out as a beginner guitar player.
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A guitarist who has learned all the notes on the fretboard: Can more effectively learn scales and chords; Has a better understanding of keys, intervals, and scale degrees; Is able to more easily memorise songs; Has a greater capacity to understand music theory; Is more effectively able to develop their aural skills; Gets ‘lost’ far less frequently when they are improvising on the guitar.