The notes found around the nut are important to learn. It will give you a better understanding of why you play chords a certain way, what the notes are in the chords that you play and also help your general musicianship - which will help in pretty much all aspects of your playing!

Video Lesson

 

Notes In The Open Position

Notes in Open Position

The diagram on the left shows all the notes in the open position - up to the 5th fret.

The ones we are most concerned with are the notes in the first 3 frets - these MUST be memorised now... but it is easy to do that if you learned your Note Circle well.

Notice that E and F and B and C are always next to each other (remember that they are only a semitone apart) and that all the others have a fret between them.

I hope that by now you can work out what the notes rae between each of the "white" notes. If not - go back and revise BC-152 • The Note Circle.

 

Suggested Exercise

Play any open chord that you know and then work out what the notes are that you are playing. Don't worry about what you come up with yet, that is not the lesson, what I want you to get good at is working out the notes in the open position quickly and easily.

Once you can do this, you will find it relatively easy to work out notes all over the neck - you might just have to count your way up the neck a little further, but it's no harder!

Try working out the notes for every chord we have looked at so far in the course and write down what the notes are. You might even start to see relationships!

Practical Music Theory

If you are working through Practical Music Theory - you should start to see the theory in practice - how the chords are constructed, the way that major and minor chords are very similar, and be able see the chord formula's being used.

Now that you have revised the note circle and you know those open position notes, it's time to look at some chords further up the neck, ones that move around!! in BC-172 • Power Chords 1

 

HELP!!!!

HELP

If you need to ask a question about this lesson - there is a topic set up specifically to help you with this lesson. To help you find it easily you can click the following link and it will take you right the topic. You'll be able to see questions that other people had and ask your own questions! Hopefully one of the very helpful members of our community will be there to help you soon, I do go there and answer stuff too - but there are just too many questions for me to answer alone!

So click this link to get help with this lesson!

Justin's Beginner Guitar Method

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