I've received a couple of emails asking me to talk about memorizing notes on the fretboard. While memorizing the neck seems like a daunting task, it's really one of the easiest things in the world, once you understand how it works.

Western musical notation has divided one octave into 12 tones. Each tone is called a semi-tone or a half-step.  Here are the 12 notes of the Western chromatic scale:  C  C#/Db  D  D#/Eb  E  F  F#/Gb  G  G#/Ab  A  A#/Bb  B.  Each note is one half-step away from the preceding note. The notes with the "#"(sharp) and the "b" (flat) signs are basically the same notes but they are called different names which depends on whether you're going up the scale or down the scale. (More on this later)

Two semi-tones are called whole-tones or whole-steps. This bit of info is useful in dividing the chromatic scale into the major & minor scales that we use in playing music. The major scale in the key of C has the following notes: C  D  E  F  G  A  B  C. If you haven't noticed, we dropped all the notes with "#" and "b". That's because the major scale has the following intervals for an octave:  W W H W W W H    ("W" means whole-step, "H" means half-step). The natural minor scale has this interval sequence:  W H W W H W W. When applied starting on C, we'll get the following notes:  C D Eb F G Ab Bb C.  Now you try writing out the major and minor scale notes for the other tones in the chromatic scale.

What does all this have to do with the guitar neck? Plenty.

The guitar's fretboard is set up in such a way that one fret is equivalent to one half-step. That means that if you play the noteon the first fret of the "E" string then move up one fret at a time playing each one, you're already playing the chromatic scale. This also means that if you need to know what note you're playing, all you have to do is count. Let's take this illustraton:
 

Try to draw this fretboard representation on a piece of paper or if you're handy with Photoshop or any other graphic editor, just copy the image then fill out the rest of the fret notes. I've spelled out the notes from the open strings up till the 3rd fret. I did not include the sharps and flats, it's understood that they're in between the "natural" notes.

Once you're done, take a look at your work. Notice that starting from the 12th fret, everything just repeats just like from the 1st fret.

The next step is to memorize every note on the fretboard. Ha-ha! But now that you know how this works, it should be a cinch. If you should forget where a particular note is located, just count "whole-step, whole-step, half-step..." or in guitar-speak, "2 frets, 2 frets, 1 fret......"

How do you know when you've memorized the neck already? Well, here's a test that I picked up from Lee Ritenour:

1. Have a friend call out a note, any note.
2. As soon as you hear what note he called out, play the note on all 6 strings, within 2 seconds.
3. If you hit every note within the given time, congratulations! If yopu didn't, work on it.
4. Now have your friend call out a different note then repeat step 2.
5. Do this until you've played all the notes in the chromatic scale.

This test not only determines your familiarity with the fretboard but it also sharpens your reflexes, which eventually will help you when you sight-read notation and tablature.
 

Chew on this for a while and in my next lesson, I'll be talking about memorizing scales. Think happy thawts!!