The Peculiar Case Of Many Guitar Players
Why so many guitar players refuse to learn the notes on their instrument?
I’ve been playing guitar for many years, and in my youth I even taught guitar to many students. Almost any time I interact with guitar players, I notice one peculiar thing: many guitarists for some reason refuse to learn the notes on their instrument. I find that quite peculiar.
Work with any other musicians, playing any other instrument, and you’ll see that, while they may not be trained to read the sheet music notation, they all know the names of the notes that can be played on their chosen instruments, and they also know where are those notes located on the instrument. It is very rare (and in my case actually unheard of) to meet a piano player who would not know the names of the notes on the piano keyboard.
So, why are guitar players so reluctant to sit down and memorize the names of all the notes that can be played on guitar? Is it because there are too many notes there?
Well, let’s see: guitar has 6 strings. As we keep fretting any of those 6 strings, we increase the pitch. Eventually, after we hit the eleventh fret on the fretboard, we reach the same note as is on the open string, only an octave higher. Basically, each string on the guitar contain 11 different notes.
Multiply that by 6, and you get 66 notes that can be played on the first 11 frets of the guitar. Once we go beyond the 12th fret (i.e., the octave), the notes repeat. So, there isn’t much to memorize there.
Add to that the fact that, because of the way the guitar is tuned, once we fret the fifth fret on all strings except on the first high E string and third G string, that note sounds the same as the open string below it (on the third G string, when we fret the fourth fret we get the sound that’s the same as the open B string, which is below the G string). What that means is that we can easily identify those 4 notes, because we already know the names of the open strings (or, at least one would hope so).
Basically, that leaves us with 62 notes that we need to memorize and be able to name when we fret them on the guitar. Is that too much to expect? I mean, I’ve seen people who have been continuously playing guitar for decades and who still cannot identify nor name a note they fret on the guitar. It’s a bit odd, no?
CAGED System
What is really odd is that guitar instructors have come up with a hair-brained scheme known as CAGED System. It’s an acronym that stands for the major chord shapes. So we have major C chord shape, major A chord shape, major G chord shape, major E chord shape, and major D chord shape. So, what are those shapes used for? They are used to help untrained players decide which string/fret to use when playing songs. For example, if the chord they are playing over is A, for example, players should know what notes does that chord consist of (the root — A, the major third — C#, and the fifth — E). Knowing what notes does the chord consist of is important, because it will help them land on the consonant notes, and thus being able to resolve any tension.
That’s all great, but the problem is that many guitar players don’t know how to find those notes (A, C#, and E) in various places on the guitar neck. So, being lost like that, they learned to rely on some visual ‘shape’ (or, the hand formation that is used when grabbing and fretting the A chord in various positions).
That approach, in my opinion, is way too complicated. It is much, much easier and much more straightforward to simply KNOW where notes A, E, and C# are on the guitar fretboard. Being able to grab any of those notes anywhere on the guitar neck is a much more solid way of being able to play without messing up the harmony.
And yet, instead of sitting down and spending some time to memorize the strings/frets where all 11 notes, in 3 octaves, are on the guitar neck, people torture themselves with half-baked, crazy visual patterns. That’s just so counter-productive.
I would strongly advise every guitar player to drop any other exercises they are doing and to spend some time focusing on learning the notes on their instrument. Once they know that, a wonderful world of endless possibilities on the instrument opens up for them.
Forget about CAGED System, forget about various ‘boxed’ positions on the guitar. Learn the notes, where to find them on the neck, and of course memorize the constituent notes of all the chords you are using while playing. There is no big mystery to it — you only need to memorize 62 notes no the guitar. How hard can it be?