Reading Guitar Music: Musical Notation
Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here):
THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!
It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.
DON’T BE LIKE THEM!
Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks.
Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.
There are 3 ways to read guitar music: Musical Notation, Guitar Tab, and Chord Charts. Yes, there are Lead Sheets and I’m sure other things, but again these posts are for beginners.
Musical Notation is the most complicated way to read guitar music, but we’re bringing order to this confusing system right here, right now.
Musical notation is set on a series of 5 lines and 4 spaces known as a staff.
On this staff there’s a weird symbol called a treble clef (it doesn’t matter, just know what it is).
Most of the time you will also see a time signature such as 4/4, ¾, or 6/8.
Now onto all those little dots. You have five notes over lines and four notes over the spaces.
Their names are challenging to remember, but there are some silly sentences that can help us out.
For the notes on the lines, you can use:
Every
Guitarist
Begins
Doing
Fine
Or
Every
Giant
Butt
Does
Fart
Choose whichever one you’d like or make your own. If you use the first option, you can remember it better by thinking “Fine Lines.”
For the notes on spaces, it’s more set in place:
F
A
C
E
Remember that with “Space FACE.”
Now there are more notes than this and they are located on the top or bottom of the staff. You just add more and more lines (called ledger lines) to the staff to include them. The reason you don’t always see these lines is because it would make musical notation a nightmare to look at.
See. NO GOOD.
Knowing the names is just one step. Now you need to know how to play these notes.
In the picture below you will see a couple things. The circled numbers are the strings. The notes you see underneath the strings have their names and what frets to play them on. There are three notes per string except for string three (the G string), which only has two notes. This will get you every basic note on the guitar and how to play them. We’ll go more in depth on this in a later post.
In the meantime (and if you can), play through these notes to get used to them. In order to remember the notes on the staff, remember your silly sentences: “Fine Lines” and “Space FACE.”
Now you know how to read every system of guitar music. Now go forth and play!