Lauren Bateman shows how to find any note on a guitar using whole and half steps, the musical alphabet, and the 12-fret octave. She maps sharps and flats like piano black keys, then walks through the open A and low E strings with practical drills and memorization tricks.
Hey, guitar enthusiast Lauren Bateman here. Welcome back to another guitar lesson. In this video, I'm going to be answering the question, how do I find notes on my guitar? Where do I know where the specific notes are on my guitar? So we're going to talk about this in this guitar lesson video.
So I know I'm on an acoustic guitar, but this applies both to acoustic and electrics that I have here on the wall. And the major thing we're going to talk about is how to find. How do we know what note is what? You get a fretboard diagram, and that will show you. And I'll put a link below to a PDF that you guys can go and download. I'll put together a free fretboard diagram for you guys, so you can go grab that in the link below. But first, I want to show you how do I find these notes. And the most important thing that you have to know are two things, okay? You first have to know what a whole step is and. And what a half step is. Okay? In music, we have whole steps, two notes, which would be two frets on your guitar, and we have what are called half steps, which would be one note or one fret on your guitar, okay? So we're mostly going to be using half steps today to find notes so that we line up with the musical Alphabet, which is A, B, C, D, E, F, G. I'm going to start on the open A string. We'll do another string after this, but I want to start on A. And the easiest thing is to know is we'll put a piano up here, because on a piano, the sharps and flats are the black keys on the piano. We don't have black keys on a guitar, so sometimes having both is good to see. So I'll put the piano up here so that you can see both. But we're going to start on the open A string, okay? And then we're going to go to the first fret. Okay? The first note after A on the piano is a black key. It is A sharp, okay? After A sharp comes a white key, which is B. There's no B sharp, so there's no black key on the piano. After B, there's another white key. That's C. Okay? The note after C, there's a black key, C sharp, back to the white key, D. The next note is D sharp, okay? After D sharp is E. Again, there's no black key between E and F. So we go right to F. After E, then we have F sharp, then we have G. Then we have G sharp and then A. So if you got to the double dotted fret here, which is your 12th fret, that's called your octave in music. You should be back at the same note that you started at. So again from the beginning. A sharp, B. C sharp, D sharp, E. F sharp, G sharp, F. Alright, so that's how you find all the notes. And when you get to the 12th fret, it just starts again. So you'd have A sharp, B, C sharp, D, so forth and so on. Okay, so what if we don't start on the A string? What if we start on the E string? We have two of those on the guitar. So let's do the bottom E string. So we would start on E. If you look up at the piano, you'll see the next note is F. Okay, same thing. F sharp, Next note up, G. G sharp, A. A sharp B. C, C sharp, D. D sharp, E. And again F. F sharp, G, G sharp, so forth and so on. So that's how you go about finding the notes on the guitar. Memorizing the notes on the guitar is a whole other process. And I'll put up a link to a video up here for you guys when I actually record that video on how to start memorizing the fretboard, which is very, very important, especially if you want to do power chords, bar chords, if you're getting into improvising and such. But the most basic fundamental for finding what notes you have on the guitar is either to have a fretboard diagram in front of you, which can be very time consuming to be going back and forth between the guitar. The other thing is to start at the top, you know, the top string, and work your way down one note at a time. Now, just a little tip on fretboard memorization for a lot of people. I tell them to start by learning the notes that are at the dots. Because usually if you learn the notes. So on my guitar, I don't know if you can see the top. I have dots. The third, fifth, seventh and ninth fret. If you look at those dots, I know that the third dot is G. The E's nice and easy because it's all natural notes. So we have G, we have A, we have B and then we have C sharp. I lied, there is one C sharp and the first fret is F. Some people have A dot, I don't. My dots start at the third fret. So you have F, G, A, B and C sharp. So you'll know if you're trying to learn power chords or bar chords or whatever that the fifth fret is an A. So if you want to find a sharp, you just move up one, all right? Or if you know G and you need to play a G sharp, you just move up one. So we call that knowing the notes by association. There's lots of ways to learn the notes on the guitar, but for some of my students, particularly when we get into learning bar chords and power chords, we'll start with the top two strings and we learn them kind of by association with these dots, alright? And there you go, guys. That's how you find the actual notes on your guitar. Start at the open string, count up the frets, work your way through. Or you can even work backwards from the 12th fret back and just know your musical Alphabet and work your way through there. And that's how you find the notes on your guitar.
