How to Memorize Your Guitar Fret-board 

 

 Andrew Wasson of Creative Guitar Studio answers questions from off of his Guitar Blog website... 


Q). How do I go from knowing shapes in different modes to actually knowing what the note names are? It seems like learning the major and minor scale notes from the Circle of Fifths could be used as a base and then changed for different modes, but how would I memorize the fret-board?
- Mikael, Finland 

A). This is one of the most common questions that guitar players eventually face. Often this occurs because there will come a time that every guitarist starts to find that their music theory knowledge is slowly rising to a level that begins to eclipse their, "Notes on the Neck," knowledge. In order to give you a plan of action to start closing that gap, and to help to get you really knowing the locations of the notes on the fret-board - I've broken the neck into two layouts that will operate both vertically and horizontally. I also need to mention that the notes on the fret-board will be most perfectly memorized by spending time learning how to read music notation, (not TAB), actual music reading.