How many notes are on a guitar

When you play the D chord, you strum all of the strings at once. Every note is played at the same time to create the chord. Chords have a richer, fuller sound than guitar notes. I think you should follow your creative impulses. It can be incredibly overwhelming when you first start playing guitar.

I have a few suggestions to help process the barrage of information out there, but one thing is for sure…. Instead, learn some basic chords or scales that you can apply to songs. Guitar notes can help you understand the fretboard and the music in general, but it is difficult playing songs just with guitar notes. Additionally, playing chords helps build your finger strength. Let me clear up one thing: guitars use the same musical alphabet as violins, flutes, basses, and saxophones.

All instruments rely on a musical alphabet that creates a common language for all musicians. The good news is that the musical alphabet only uses 12 notes — unlike the English alphabet which uses 26 letters! In the example where I wrote out two ways to talk about the musical alphabet, all of the letters without sharps or flats stayed the same. But for A , the corresponding flat is Bb. This means that those two notes are the same.

Another way to think about this is in relation to telling time. Instead, B is essentially C. As each fret goes up by one number, you move up the musical alphabet by one space.

Think of the open string you pluck as starting at 0. From there, you move up one space in the musical alphabet. As you feel comfortable thinking about ascending the fretboard of the guitar in sharps, try descending and using flats! If you really want to help solidify your understanding of guitar notes in relation to the fretboard, try saying the notes out loud as you play them.

By now, you may have noticed that finding guitar notes high up the fretboard can feel disorienting. These are called fret markers. If you ever lose your place on the fretboard, you can use the fret markers to guide you towards the guitar note you wanted to play.

Take a look at the image below showing every single note on a standard fret guitar:. What do you see? The first thing I noticed was the clear distinction of the three possible octaves you can play every note on the guitar in one of these three octaves. I also noticed the frequent repetition of notes inside of each octave. To sum it up, the most important takeaway here is that a fret guitar can play 37 notes across 3 different octaves.

You can play each note in multiple different ways there's overlap , and you can cover every single one of the 37 notes your guitar can play by going through an E chromatic scale, note by note, up three octaves. Compared to acoustic and electric guitars, the notes on bass guitars are a little bit different.

Before we push ahead, there's an important distinction to make: 4-string bass guitars vs. A 4-string bass has a standard open string tuning of E, A, D, G thick to thin. This is typically the standard tuning for five string bass guitars since it provides a lower note range.

There are also 6-string, 8-string, and string bass guitars, but we won't be covering those here. If you take a look at the illustration below, we show the note positions of a typical right-handed 4-string and 5-string bass, along with all of the possible notes across 12 frets. And that's all there is to it. The most significant difference in bass guitars, when compared to an acoustic or an electric, is the alternative lower tuning such as the standard B, E, A, D, G tuning in 5-string basses.

If you're picking up and learning how to play bass, make sure you remember the standard tunings for 4-strings and 5-strings depending on the model you have. Once you've got those memorized, you'll be much more comfortable tuning your guitar and have the ability to branch out further and learn more and more every day. Luckily, there are quite a few acronyms people came up with just for this purpose.

Let's get to it! I hope that you're feeling a little bit more confident about knowing where each note is on each type of guitar. Even though it's slightly different for bass guitars, acoustics and electrics are reasonably straightforward practically identical.

And as a suggestion for going forward, I'd recommend that you look over the acronyms above based on the type of guitar you play and either choose an abbreviation that stands out to you the most or creates your own! This gives you a reference point to start learning. As you can see from the following fretboard images, the first fret is one half-step up from the string name or note. Just remember the BC and EF rule to keep your notes in order. Now for the next trick in helping you learn the guitar fretboard.

You only need to learn the first 12 frets as the notes begin repeating. For instance, look at the B String image above. On fret 12, the note becomes B again. Fret 13 would then be C, the same as fret 1.

All you really have to learn is octave centers and your E and A strings. You can find any note on the fretboard just by referencing octaves on these strings. References are always two strings over.