Guitar Geography

A lot of people have a hard time understanding how notes are laid out on the guitar. Our distant cousin, the piano has a very simple lay out. The notes are arranged from left to right, low to high, one half step at a time. It is one dimensional and presented in stunning black and white.

The guitar on the other hand is laid out in 2 dimensions and in less than dazzling grayscale, which makes it approximately 106 times more complicated. The first thing to clear up is the relationship between high and low notes on one string, then the relationship between strings.

When you play an open string, you are playing the lowest possible note on that string. When you press down at the 1st fret of that string you are playing a note a half step higher, which is the 2nd lowest note on that string. As you continue to the 2nd, 3rd, 4th frets etc. you are continuing to move up one half step at a time. This is the equivalent of moving from left to right on the piano hitting all the keys in order (black & white). Due to the fact that the notes get higher as you move in this direction, this is referred to as moving up the neck. This is really important, you need be thinking up as your left hand moves closer to your right hand. This obviously means that moving your hands further apart is working your way down the neck.

As far as the strings are concerned, they are numbered from 1 to 6 with the 1st string being the highest in pitch. This is the thinnest string, which is closest to the floor. The lowest string, the 6th, is closest to the ceiling. This is a big problem! This means that if I ask you to move to a higher string I expect you to move towards the floor. Do not think of moving from the 3rd string to the 2nd string as going down, this is going up. Remember, the only criteria for labeling directions is pitch. On the guitar, there is no correlation between movement in space and movement to a higher or lower note or string.

Now that that’s perfectly clear we can address a really confusing issue- you can play the same note in more than one place. This is one of the factors in the guitar being 106 times more complicated than the piano. Speaking of the piano, imagine a mini keyboard that only has 1 octave (13 notes inclusive to be precise). The 6th string of the guitar could be thought of as one of these mini keyboards with a range of notes from E to E. This includes the notes from open E up to the E at the 12th fret.

Now imagine that you have six of these 13-note mini keyboards stacked up next to each other like on an organ. Each keyboard represents an octave’s worth of notes but they overlap and duplicate some notes with their neighbor keyboards. This is one way of visualizing the guitar. The 6th string covers the notes from E to E, The 5th string from A to A, the 4th string from D to D, etc. but the A on the 5th string is exactly the same as the A on the 6th string. The open D string is the same as the D on the A string (5th fret) and the D on the 6th string (10th fret).

Check out the diagram below and let me know if any of this makes sense.