John Wicker.com

There’s an old joke about guitar players that goes like this:

Q: How do you stop a guitar player from playing so much?
A: Put some sheet music in front of him.

A lot of guitarists first starting playing by picking up Uncle Fred’s beat up acoustic and noodling around. If we’re serious, we are encouraged to practice until our fingers bleed, to learn scales and chords and arpeggios, to study solos and learn them note-by-note. We are encouraged to study the masters and to learn from their styles, to determine what kind of guitar and amplifier and effects pedals they play. But we are rarely encouraged to actually learn music, and the guitarist who can actually read (much less play) sheet music is incredibly rare. It’s so rare that some guitar player invented []tablature, which is a way to record what frets to play on what string. There are actually pieces of software that you can use to record tablature and play it back.

Most guitarists eventually pick up the name for most of the common chords they play, and they can remember what note each open string on their instrument is tuned to. We can learn all kinds of fairly advanced musical theory by way of different types of scales and modes, different types of chords and so on, but all of that stuff goes out the window the first time the singer wants to change the key of a song to better suit their voice.

I’m not about to say that a guitarist who can’t read music is somehow lesser than one who can. But there are still times when it would be nice to if we musician’s all had a common language that describes the notes we’re playing. You’ll learn that the first time your keyboard player asks you what key you’re playing in and you tell her that it’s the seventh fret on the fifth string. Or when you’re trying to work on an original song and someone tells you that an A flat would sound really good at that one precise moment.

The truth is, we never had a tool like Learn the Fretboard to help us along the way. This site presents a free PDF that gives you a method to learn the notes at every position on the fretboard. It minimizes rote memorization in favor of various methods geared to helping you remember and learn faster. I’ve read through the first couple of chapters and it made a lot of sense to me.

This is NOT going to teach you to read music. But with the foundation of knowing what all the notes are, learning scales, understanding chord theory, transposing songs and so much more now becomes much more manageable.

So if you want to learn more about the way your axe works, talk to other musician’s in a common language, or amaze your bandmates with your late night bar tricks, go forth and study!