By: Brett McQueen
Having a working knowledge and understanding of the guitar fretboard is absolutely essential if you want to be able to solo, improvise, or compose on the guitar. Learning riffs and licks to your favorite pop songs can only take you so far. You might know how to play these from tab or even by ear, but do you really know what you are playing and how it all connects together?
Fortunately, obtaining a complete grasp on the guitar fretboard is not as hard as it might seem. It’s a bit daunting when you look at every string and then all the frets on the guitar neck. There are a lot of notes. However, as you start with the basics, and then build on those basics, you’ll find that reoccurring patterns and positions begin to appear, and you’ll be able to start making connections more quickly as you go. You have to start somewhere though, and the biggest challenge is often knowing where to start.
In this lesson, we’re going to look at five ways to approach learning the guitar fretboard. Ideally, you want to incorporate all of these ways in your practice. When we’re talking about scales, it might be helpful to know some basic music theory behind guitar scales and how scales are constructed and formed, because there won’t be enough room to be able to look at all the details of that in this lesson. Rather than diving into a whole bunch of theory, we’re just going to look at some practical steps and exercises that you will be able to quickly and easily take into your practice room.
Memorizing is quite possibly one of the least exciting ways to learn the guitar fretboard (in my opinion), but memorizing the individual notes on the guitar fretboard is an excellent place to start. Essentially, you’ll study a fretboard note chart like this (click to open in new window), and then quiz yourself as you randomly select a string and position on the fretboard.
If you’re a visual learner, you might really like this way of learning the fretboard, but even if you’re not, seeing the notes visually on the fretboard in combination with these other methods is a powerful way to learn the fretboard. It’s good to at least glance and look over this for a quick bit before you move on to other exercises.
It’s not just enough to learn a bunch of individual notes, it’s important to know how these individual notes connect and relate with one another in different scales and keys. One way to do this is to start learning the twelve major keys in all five scale positions (click to open in a new window). Each scale position is played at a different place on the fretboard.
The picture above roughly designates the five scale positions. It might be easy to think that four fingers will span the four frets of a scale position, although an actual scale might span more than four frets. For example, if you were to play a C major scale in the 1st position, you would start playing the scale on the low open E string, and play the scale all the way up through all six strings while keeping your hand in that scale position. As you move to the 2nd position, you would start on the G on the 3rd fret of the low E string, the A on the 5th fret of the low E string for the 3rd position, and so on.
Start learning a C major scale, which has no sharps or flats, in all positions. Then move to the following keys:
G major (1 sharp)
F major (1 flat)
D major (2 sharps)
Bb major (2 flats)
A major (3 sharps)
Eb major (3 flats)
E major (4 sharps)
Ab major (4 flats)
B major (5 sharps)
Db major (5 flats)
F# major (6 sharps)
You might need to use the fretboard note chart as a reference. You’ll notice as you go through the different keys that many of the different scale positions and patterns tend to repeat. You’ll inevitably learn these patterns. However, you’ll want to be very intentional about not just learning the patterns, but learning the notes that make up the scale pattern as a whole.
While you’re practicing your scales, verbalize the name of the note. This takes a bit more time right now, but it’ll save you time in the long run because you’ll actually be learning the notes that make up the fretboard.
The end goal of this is that you learn all twelve major scales in all positions. If you can do this, you’re off to an excellent start to getting a grasp on the fretboard. Try to learn a scale a week. After your major scales, move on to melodic minor and then harmonic minor.
When you solo, you’re not just randomly selecting some notes within a scale pattern.
When you solo, you’re playing over a chord progression, and there will be certain notes that fit over that chord progression and some that won’t fit.
For example, a C chord is composed of the notes C, E, and G. If you’re solo is only playing the notes D, F, A, and B, these notes will eventually want to resolve to the notes C, E, and G. It’s fine to play these notes outside of the C chord as passing tones to add color, but you want to resolve these notes eventually.
This is why it can be helpful to know your major, minor, augmented, and diminished triads up and down the guitar neck. In knowing your triads, you will know several ways to play any given chord over the guitar fretboard. This allows you to visualize these triads or chords anywhere, so you’ll know where to resolve notes in your solo.
For example, if you are soloing over an E minor chord, and you know all the positions for an E minor triad, you can solo around these triads, and you won’t just be playing some random notes up and down the fretboard.
Once you know all five scale positions in all twelve keys, you can mix it up a little bit. For this exercise, you will choose any of the scale positions. In that position, you will start off by ascending up the scale in C major. When you get to the highest note of the scale in that position, you will then descend a perfect 4th in F major.
This causes your brain to get out of just seeing patterns. As you know, a C major scale has no sharps or flats, but an F major scale has one flat–Bb. As you’re descending, you have to adjust all of the B natural notes into Bb’s. Not as easy as you might think!
Once, you descend from an F major, in the same position, ascend another perfect 4th to Bb major. Again, you’ll have to pay attention to the different notes in the scale. As you know, a Bb major scale not only has a Bb but also an Eb as well.
You will continue this ascending and descending exercise in the same scale position through all twelve keys in intervals of a perfect 4th. So the progression will look like this:
C –> F –> Bb –> Eb –> Ab –> Db –> Gb –> B –> E –> A –> D –> G –> and then back to C
Once, you get comfortable with your major keys, continue on to melodic minor and harmonic minor scales in all twelve keys.
One of the best ways that I’ve found learning the guitar fretboard is to put all the technical work into application. It gets really boring and monotonous to just play scale patterns up and down the guitar neck (although necessary!). One of the best experiences I had of this was in college when I was taking my first semester of guitar and learning Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 Prelude in the key of D major. By the time I had learned the song, I had a very good grasp of the key of D major up and down the fretboard.
You don’t have to learn Bach though to learn the fretboard. You can pick any pop song you hear on the radio. Figure out the key the song is in and the chords of the song. If the song is in G major, work on playing melodies over top of the song’s chord progression.
Experiment. This is why knowing your scale positions and triads will be very important. You definitely want to put in the time working on the technical side of guitar, but seek out ways to apply things practically as well.
Again, this is just a plan with some exercises to help you learn the guitar fretboard. I wish I was able to go more into talking about the theory behind it, but that would be a completely other topic. Hopefully, this gives you a bit more of a concrete plan towards learning the guitar fretboard and allows you to set some concrete goals.
Brett McQueen is recently basking in the glory of completing his studies in music and theology at university. In the unsettling freedom of currently not having a steady job, he is a worship leader, musician, songwriter, and blogger. Brett is passionate about teaching free guitar lessons for beginners so other people can succeed and reach their goals as musicians and artists.
