Reading Directions
In This Chapter
- Reading chord charts
- A very brief glance at reading notation
- A quick look at guitar tablature
- Some notes about rhythm and timing
- Tips on reading notation, charts, and tablature
Now that you know your notes, you need a way to read them more efficiently than using a fretboard map. After all, you don’t want to read pages of “put your finger on the such and such fret of the such and such string” over and over when you can get the same information with a quick glance.
That being said, fretboard maps such as those used in the previous chapter are going to be the bulk of your reading material. You’ll also want to be adept at reading chord charts, which is possibly even easier to do than reading fretboard maps.
Finally, you’ll also want to know a little about both standard music notation and guitar tablature. Please note the words “a little.” You can, as mentioned in Chapter 1, play guitar all your life without ever using notation or tablature. But knowing the smallest bits of both can help you immensely.
More importantly, your focus on guitar theory means that we can’t spend a lot of time on this subject. We’ll go over the very basics as well as a few very important points that will prove invaluable if you are serious about learning as much about guitar theory as you can.
In Chapter 1, you learned that the two big focal points of guitar theory, such as it is today, are scales and chords. Fretboard maps obviously give you an excellent way to chart scales as you play them along the neck of your guitar.
Chord charts, essentially, are detailed segments of fretboard maps. Like fretboard maps, they are laid out in a grid, but they are set up with the neck on the vertical plane and the frets on the horizontal plane. Here is a chord chart of Em (E minor), which is possibly the easiest chord you already know:
Chord chart for Em.
Here the nut of the guitar is designated by the heavy line at the top of the grid. The strings are the vertical lines and, from left to right (same as low to high), are E, A, D, G, B, and E. The horizontal lines are your frets.
If you see an open circle above the nut, it means you should play the corresponding string under that circle as an open string. In this example, you would play the low and high E strings, the G string, and the B string without placing a finger on them.
Circles placed within the grid itself (which may be filled in or not depending on whomever put together the chart) indicate where you should place a finger to fret that particular note. In this Em chord, you want to place a finger on the second fret of the A string and one on the second fret of the D string.
Xing Strings Out
You will sometimes see an “X” on a chord chart, either above the nut or directly on the grid:
Chord charts for Am and G.
In both cases, you don’t want to play the string with the “X” over it. In this example, playing the Am is easy enough; you simply start your strum at the open A string, skipping over the low E string as you strum.
With the G chord, it’s a little trickier. The easiest way to play this particular G chord is to slightly flatten whatever finger is playing the G note at the third fret of the low E (thickest) string so that it brushes lightly enough on the adjoining A string to dampen it. As you strum through all six strings, the slight “tunk” of the muted A string will be drowned out by the ringing of the other strings. This technique is called “string muting.”
Setting a Barre
Chord charts will use a heavy arced line to indicate the use of a barre:
Chord charts for F and Fm.
In this example, the F chord is formed by laying the index flat to cover the high E and B strings at the first fret while the middle and ring fingers play the notes on the G and D strings, respectively.
For the Fm, the index finger is placed across all six strings at the first fret, leaving the middle finger to play the C note at the third fret of the A string and the ring finger to play the F note at the third fret of the D string.
You’ll be learning all about barre chords and how they are derived from basic open-position chords in Chapter 9.
As you move up the neck, chord charts indicate a change of position by placing a number at the right of the first fret of the grid to indicate exactly which fret it should be:
Chord charts for D and G.
Here, the first chord is your usual open-position D chord (note the Xs over the low E and A strings). The second chord, G, is fingered in exactly the same way only at the seventh and eighth frets. The third chord, D, uses a two-string barre similar to the F chord in the previous example, only it is played at the tenth fret.
A Very Brief Guide to Music Notation
Contrary to what you may hear or read, learning music notation is fairly easy if you’re of a mind to do so. As a guitarist you’re really interested in fewer than 30 notes of standard notation, so if you can learn one or two a day you’ll know your notes inside of a month.
But, like all aspects of music, getting good at it takes practice. Think about how much you read in a normal day. You may not think so, but you read words everywhere−on television and computer screens, on traffic signs and billboards, even on your box of cereal. Books may actually be pretty far down on the list!
The point, though, is that you can now read without thinking about it at all, simply because you do so every day. With just a little practice and repetition, it won’t take you long to learn to read standard music notation. Again, that’s if, and only if, you decide to do so.
For now, though, here are the basics that can help you out.
Lines and Spaces
In standard notation notes are written out on a staff, which is a set of five horizontal lines. The staff is divided into measures, each of which is meant to contain a certain number of beats as shown in the time signature, which is at the very left of the first measure of a piece of music. Right before the time signature, you’ll see a key signature, which indicates which notes are meant to be flat or sharp throughout the piece:
The Notes of the Open Strings
Notes are identified in standard notation by where they are placed on the staff. Here are the notes of each line and space:
Notes of the staff in standard notation.
The top space, as you can see, is E. This is the E note which matches your high E string. Here are all the notes of your open strings:
Notes of the open strings in standard notation.
As notes go higher or lower than the range of the staff, ledger lines are added to indicate where the note is. In the above example, you can see that the A of the open A string is placed two ledger lines below the staff. Since E (which would be the E note at the second fret of the D string) is the lowest line of the staff, D is in the space below that, C occupies the ledger line immediately below that, B is in the space below C, and A (as shown) is on the second ledger line below the staff.
Guitar tablature uses a set of six horizontal lines, one for each of the guitar’s strings. In this, tablature (or “tab” for short) resembles a fretboard map. But tab is also divided into measures, like standard notation. To indicate a particular note, numbers from 0 to 22 are placed on a line. This shows which fret of which string to place your finger to create the note. A “0” indicates that you play the open string. Like music notation, you read tab from left to right, regardless of where on the lines a note may appear.
Track 2
An example of guitar tablature.
In this example, you start by placing a finger on the first fret of the B string and then playing that note. Next, remove your finger and play the open B string. After that, place a finger at the second fret of the G string and play that note, followed by playing the open G string. Next, play the note at the third fret of the D string, followed by the note at the second fret of the D string, followed by the open D string. Finally, place a finger at the third fret of the A string and play that note. Once you’re comfortable with what you’re doing, you’ll be able to make it sound as it does in the audio sample.
With both notation and tablature, chords are indicated by stacking the notes or the numbers in a row, one atop the other depending on where the notes are. Here are all the notes (excluding accidentals) of the first five frets, followed by the chords C, A, G, E, and D:
Notes of the first five frets.
Marking Time
Guitar tablature and music notation differ in one crucial way. Here is the audio of Track 2, played in three different ways:
Track 4
Revisiting audio Track 2.
Hopefully you notice how different the rhythm was in each track. Guitar tablature, as a rule, rarely accounts for the timing of its notes. Standard notation manages to give you both the name of the note by its placement on the staff and its rhythmic value by means of its shape. Here is a quick breakdown:
Notes by rhythmic value.
As before, chords are indicated by stacking notes with the same rhythmic value on top of each other.
This is just scratching the surface of the variety of rhythmic possibilities open to the guitarist. Reading rhythms is often more of a challenge than reading just the notes.
When dealing with just chords, rhythms are often written out in rhythm notation, which looks like a combination of standard notation and slashes. Here is the last example written in rhythm notation:
Track 5
An example of rhythm notation.
Since the focus of this book is on the guitar’s fretboard, all the musical examples will be written out in quarter notes (one beat) or eighth notes (half-beat).
This is not to say that rhythm isn’t important. To the contrary, good rhythm is far more important than almost all the other things you’ll learn about in guitar theory. One could write a whole book (or two) on the subject alone. Our task here, though, is to become as knowledgeable as possible with our guitar’s fretboard, so we’ll have to save working on the intricacies of rhythm for another time.
Tips on Reading Any Kind of Music
For whatever it may be worth, reading music notation often leads to a huge breakthrough in guitar theory that guitarists who only read tablature tend to take quite a while to get. Have another look at the example accompanying Track 3 and pay particular attention to the chords at the end.
Then have a look at this:
Track 6
An example of reading music by phrases.
This may, at first, seem like a group of random notes, but if you examine the music closely (whether the notation or the tablature) you’ll see that each measure represents a chord being played through a combination of single strings as well as “partial chords,” meaning just two or three strings at a time.
A comparison to regular reading is again in order. You have long passed the need to read any word letter by letter. In fact, you probably take in whole phrases and sentences at a time. The same thing happens after you’ve practiced reading music notation or guitar tablature with an eye towards picking out chords. The more you can make this type of connection with your reading, the easier it becomes to play a musical passage you’ve never tried before.
Learning to read in musical phrases involves being aware of patterns in the written aspect of music. In other words, it’s just notes and chords written out in code. The pattern is there but it’s now a visual pattern instead of one of an audio nature.
Both guitar tablature and music notation are very striking visually, but it is a lot easier for people to pick out the distinctive stacking of chords in notation than a group of numbers set out on a page. If you consider yourself a visual learner, the odds are that you will find reading music notation such a help you’ll be wondering why you never bothered to learn it.
- Chord charts show you the shapes of chords in a grid format.
- There are nuances to reading chord charts, such as looking for open or muted strings as well as using barres or playing farther up the neck of the guitar.
- Guitar tablature will show you the notes but usually not the rhythm in which the notes are played.
- Standard music notation will show you both the notes and their rhythm but not necessarily where on the fretboard to play those notes.
- Reading either notation or tablature with an eye out for chord shapes will help you know how to position your fingers when playing.