Notes and Lines

Notes of the Guitar Fretboard

For reference by the beginning guitarist, we present here a simple diagram showing the notes of the guitar fretboard by string and fret. Frets are numbered in both arabic and roman numerals. The notes are shown as naturals and sharps. For flatted equivalents, see the "Enharmonic Equivalents", indicating for example that if a Bb is needed, use the positions shown for A#. You can download and print this Notes of the Guitar Fretboard Wall Chart in convenient PDF form.

Announcing the Winfield Winners

The Walnut Valley Festival is an annual event held in Winfield, Kansas featuring contests and performances for a variety of acoustic instruments including guitar. The two guitar events are the National Guitar Flat Pick Championship and the International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship. The event is held for 4-days during the 3rd weekend of September and has evolved since 1972 to include family entertainment on 4 stages simultaneously, a large quality, juried arts and crafts fair, workshops, and acoustic instrument contests. Festival attendance has been between 11,000 and 15,000 annually, and most of the people who attend play an instrument of some kind, and a good portion of them bring their instruments and participate in the campsite picking. Since its beginning, the contests have attracted 3,000 contestants from all 50 states and Australia, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, England, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Caledonia, Switzerland, and Wales. Some of the best-known Winfield winners include Mark O'Connor of Nashville, Tennessee, who has won or placed in more Walnut Valley Festival contests than any other contestant. Mark won the National Guitar Flat-Picking Championship in 1975 and 1977, and also won the Walnut Valley Fiddle Championship in 1974 and 1977. Alison Krauss of Nashville, won the Walnut Valley Fiddle Championship in 1984 and Steve Kaufman of Alcoa, Tennessee, is the only three-time winner of the National Guitar Flat-Picking Contest, having won in the years 1978, 1984, and 1986 respectively. Other Winfield winners include Mandolin virtuoso Chris Thile, the Mandolin Champion in 1993 and Dixie Chick fiddler Martie Erwin Seidel in 1987 and 89. And now the 2006 guitar winners …

Grading Your Guitar Skills

The question of how good you are as a guitar player is one of those yin and yang issues.  On the yin side is forgetting about what you know and just listening to the music you're making.  If you are happy with your sounds, you're good!  In the yin world, everybody's got their own goals, ears, styles, likes and "good" is completely arbitrary.  And I don't mean this to be a hypothetical concept - some of the most enjoyable music listening experiences I've had have been with street corner music makers who clearly had very limited skills, but who were just out there making their music, and putting everything they had into it.  Ultimately the technical skills we develop are about creating channels for creativity and artistic expression.  If you can achieve those same artistic goals with few skills, then "yin" is your thing.  However, there is a definite yang to this story. 

The yang of how good your are has to do with measuring guitar knowledge and skills against an objective, measurable benchmark.  This provides an opportunity to measure progress and chart the needed learnings ahead.  You may be happy with the sounds you're getting, and people may compliment you on your playing, but you wonder what else you need to learn or what you should work on next.  That's the yang of the "how good" question, and in this post we take a look at the guitar grading system offered by the Registry of Guitar Tutors.

Learning new guitar styles

One of the best things about playing guitar is that there are so many diverse styles.  Learning a new style is not only fun, it can also be great for helping you find your own sound, by integrating the styles that you love. I recently had an experience like this where an opportunity arose to play for fun in a large corporate event (a kind of "talent" show).  One of my favorite guitar styles is flatpicking, and I was planning to play a transcription of Doc Watson's rendition of the Black Mountain Rag.  This is one of my favorites, both to play and to listen to Doc play.  But after practicing it quite a bit on my Taylor flat-top, even though I was happy with my playing, it was just feeling tired.  I had played it this way too many times before.  Then, inspiration struck - let's change the accompaniment from bluegrass band to rockabilly and play it on the Telecaster!  Wow - new sound ... even better it was my sound!  Suddenly I had knitted together two styles that have been very influential on me - Doc Watson's open string licks with the twang, echo and mild distortion of rockabilly.  This was one of the ten best days in my guitar playing "career." 

Many guitar players get a big kick out of learning new styles because the “payoff to effort” ratio can be so high.  Most new styles will produce a very satisfying result using your current skills with just a few new techniques, licks or equipment settings.  Even a style requiring extensive new skills, such as classical guitar, can be easily accessed through simple to play tablature arrangements of classical pieces.

Playing Big Band Jazz Guitar

Playing guitar in a jazz big band is one of the great challenges and joys of guitar playing.  I'm referring here to "big" bands, which may be as small as nine musicians, and up to the 20 or so in a full big band.  The unifying characteristic is that the musicians are playing from formally arranged music (charts) requiring the ability to sight-read guitar rhythms, and less often, to sight read note-for-note lines.  This is a very different role for the guitar player than small ensemble jazz (trios, quartets, etc.), where the musicians are reacting to each other and playing what feels right in the moment.

The great fun of these bands lies in the opportunity to work with a cross-section of musicians and instruments, the chance to be part of making some great music and the technical challenge of doing a good job.  It's not uncommon for the band director to pass out a chart for a song you've never heard and just say "Okay, a-one, a-two, a-one, two, three, four" and the band is off an running.  All the more fun is that you don't know if everyone plays from the beginning, or maybe it's just you alone.  It's a great way to raise your overall level of musicianship, and it's a great feeling when the band is humming along on a groove that you're driving from the rhythm chair.  And when the infrequent soloing opportunity comes along, it is a special feeling to take a solo with a big band behind you: to me it's like racing down train tracks with a freight train right behind you - you better not slip up because in four bars all those horns are about to start the shout chorus!

Capo Madness - The Guitarist's Guide to the Capo

It's easy to believe that you know everything there is to know about a capo until you read "The Guitarist's Guide to the Capo - the ultimate user's guide" by Rikky Rooksby.  He immediately debunks the notion that "a capo should only be used by those who find that pieces of music are written too low for them to comfortably sing while playing" (which he quotes from a somewhat ancient guitar text) and points out that using a capo creates a totally different sound to playing barre shapes.  An that is the essence of the book - getting new sounds with capos, and it is an eye opener. 

Rooksby begins with an overview of the history and origin of the capo and its name, then covers the pros and cons of capo models including the elastic capo, Jim Dunlop (lever-action, picker's pal and C-clamp), Shubb (original , deluxe & partial), Kyser quick-change, the glider capo and the third-hand capo.  This book is thorough!

The heart of the book is making sounds with the capo, and the accompanying CD has 60 demo tracks.  With brief quizzes to test your knowledge throughout, the book covers:

- capo basics
- transposing songs for singers
- the capo as a "barre reducer"
- guitar-friendly keys
- tone and feel
- knowing where the notes are
- working with two guitars
- capo tricks for arrangers
- capos and doubleneck guitars
- capos and altered tunings
- capo detection - use your ears to hear when others are using a capo
- the partial capo
- the third hand capo
- combining capos
- list of famous songs that use capos.

Clearly there's a lot more to the capo than slapping one on to change keys.  While I know that some guitar players are already aware of the many techniques presented, the majority of players have not  even begun to understand the potential for new sounds that Rooksby covers so well.

One of the nicest things about this book is the style of publishing and illustration.  It is very nicely illustrated and designed, with large clear photographs where needed, and chord diagrams, tab and recordings to make everything clear.  There are over 100 photos and diagrams.

I think any guitar player would enjoy having this book, but it's got special appeal to singer/songwriters, arrangers and acoustic strummers.  It would also appeal to the self-taught musician who likes to learn something new and then apply it on their own.  I would highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest in the topic.

To see more or for purchase information: The Guitarist's Guide to the Capo

Our Homage to Berklee's "A Modern Method for Guitar"

We like to stylize the headers (the design at the top of the page) of Notes and Lines in the styles of famous music instruction books and icons.  Our August/September design comes from a Berklee classic, "A Modern Method for Guitar" by William Leavitt.  We love the quirky design and color of the three books in this series, and hope that you enjoy being reminded of this guitar classic.

Hal Leonard Guitar Method vs. Berklee "A Modern Method for Guitar"

I recently answered an email question off the blog that I thought I'd share here.

The Hal Leonard Guitar Method and the Berklee "A Modern Method for Guitar" are very different books, so it's good that you seek a comparison. The Berklee book is a much more formal and intensive course. It's longer (124 pages vs. 47 pages for Hal Leonard), and printed in a more classic and formal style (10 staffs per page vs. 8 for Hal Leonard. The Hal Leonard book is designed for someone just learning to play. The Berklee book is for someone who's decided they want to pursue a serious course of study. Pricing is a bit different also - Berklee vol 1 Book/CD/DVD is about $28 while Hal Len Book/CD/DVD is about $20. One thing that's the same is neither one uses tab - that's not good or bad, just a fact. We carry both in our store, and get good feedback from customers on both. They're both published by Hal Leonard and serve different customer needs. If you're interested in either we have them in stock - Hal Leonard Guitar Method Book 1, Berklee A Modern Method for Guitar Book 1.