Notes on the neck
Learn the name of every note on the fretboard — the first building block that makes every chord, scale, and song you'll ever learn make sense.
Notes on the neck
Your species divides the octave into twelve steps, and your guitar lays all twelve out in a straight line on every string. Once you can name what’s under each finger, the instrument stops being a grid of anonymous dots: chords become notes you chose, scales become patterns you understand, and “play a G” becomes a two-second task instead of a search.
This course takes you from the six open strings to naming any natural note on any string from memory. Four exercises: the open strings, the musical alphabet and its two famous half steps, octave shapes for mapping one note everywhere, and a drill to make it all automatic.
No music theory background needed — this is the background.
Exercises
- Exercise 00Interview✓Tell your tutor what you already know about this course's topic and what you want to get out of it.
- Exercise 01The open strings✓Learn the names of the six open strings, a mnemonic to keep them, and why everything repeats at the twelfth fret.
- Exercise 02Natural notes and the two half steps✓Learn the musical alphabet, whole steps and half steps in frets, and the two natural-note pairs that sit only a half step apart.
- Exercise 03Octave shapes✓Use the two-strings-over octave shape — and its shifted cousin across the B string — to find any note everywhere on the neck.
- Exercise 04Name that note✓A call-and-response drill that makes note names automatic, starting with the two strings where barre chords and scale roots live.