What are Guitar Notes?
A note is simply a way of representing a musical sound. Symbols are used to represent these notes which tells us the duration (length) that the given note is held for and when placed on a staff, it will tell us the pitch of that sound. Pitch is a way of describing how high or how low something sounds. A great example of this is a high pitched scream a horror movie. It hurts our ears because it sounds extremely high. An example of a low pitch would be a truck rumbling along on your street.
Notes can be compared to the road signs you see when driving along in your community. They tell you what to do, or in this case play, and they will give you directions. Notes have various shapes and stems coming from them but generally look like little round/oval dots.
How is a note named?
Notes are named after the first seven letters of the alphabet and are as follows:
A – B – C – D – E – F – G
..After the G, you will start again at A. The cycle will then begin to repeat itself from the beginning:
A – B – C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C – D – E – F – G – A…
… You may be wondering why we have two notes that are named A. The reason that they are both named A is that they sound alike, even though they are higher and lower than one another.
All of these notes have different pitches, meaning that some sound higher, while others sound lower. This is the glue that makes music work.
There are many notes on the first string however, we’re only going to take a look at three of them. These three guitar notes for beginners are an essential step to being able to play written music right away.
So how to remember the strings on a guitar? You can memorizing the fretboard or print it out as reference. The more practice you have on the notes, it will be easier for you to remember the notes on the fretboard inside out…
On your fretboard, they are as follow…
Guitar String Notes Chart:
The three guitar notes that we will be dealing with are notes E, F, and G on the first string.
On the staff, these guitar notes for songs look like this:
Use your first and third fingers to finger F and G.
Let’s putting it into practice…
Try playing the following measures using the information from above. Make sure you are playing the correct guitar note on the correct fret.