Playing Sheet Music — Finding Notes on the Guitar

One of the top questions I get asked again and again is: “Do I actually have to be able to read music?”. My answer to that is actually always: “You don’t have to, but it helps!”. 🙂

We guitarists are a bit spoiled. Not only because we have learned to read music from Tabs — i.e. from a visual fretboard — but also because we can simply play chords and thus completely dispense with Notes and Tabs.

But what if I absolutely want to play the melody of a song and not just accompany it?

Alternative to reading music

As always, first the alternative.

In another post I already mentioned how to download sheet music for guitar (more precisely: tabs).

So either you get yourself a software (desktop, tablet or smartphone) like e.g. Guitar Pro, simply download the desired sheet music and then play the tabs from it.

Or you buy songbooks, books with riffs or licks and play them directly from the tabs.

Understanding music reading

Before we look for the notes on the fretboard, we first have to understand how the whole thing works:

You can remember well where the note “G” is located. Namely exactly in the middle of the belly of our treble clef:

From there you can now count up and down in the alphabet.

Musical alphabet

Starting from “A” the musical alphabet goes:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G

Whereby the “B” is called “H” in some countries. Since most tuners, especially the apps on smartphones, display a “B”, we now also learn it with “B”.

Now we count down from “G” to “C”.

C to C

Here we see the notes from “C” to the next octave “C”.

We start with the red note, play the alphabet up (C, D, E, F etc.) and stop on the orange note.

C to C (next octave)

Here we play again from “C” to the next higher “C”, but each note one octave higher.

Finally, let’s look at the lowest playable note on the guitar, the low “E” to the next octave “E”.

This is played on the guitar as follows:

Now you can actually “calculate” all the other notes.

Reading music with the guitar

Before we learn notes, we first need to know how the guitar is constructed or where to find the notes afterwards.

Variant 1

In this variant we simply learn all the notes on the fretboard between fret 0 and 12 by heart.

So if a “C” should be played, we don’t have to search long, but already know all possible “C’s” and find it quickly.

It is not necessary to learn semitones such as “G#” or “Db” etc. by heart, as these can be easily found once you know where the next “G” or “D” is located.

To do this, set a metronome to about 60 bpm, write down a few notes (e.g.: C, E, F, G) and try to find the notes on the fretboard at each click (60 bpm).

Finish one note first before moving on to the next. So find all C’s, then all E’s etc. At some point this should work so fast that you can set the metronome to a higher speed.

Variant 2

I personally find the second variant better because it is more structured.

Here we force ourselves to stay within a certain range.

A good book to learn this variant is: “Reading Studies for Guitar by William Leavitt”.

So for example we try to stay within fret 1–4, where each finger gets one fret.

So the first fret is played by the index finger, the second fret by the middle finger, etc. Plus or minus one fret.

That is, if a note cannot be found within these four frets, you can either go one fret forward (with the little finger in the 5th fret) or one fret back (with the index finger in the 0th fret, although we don’t need a finger for that).

I have marked these “extra” notes in orange in this example:

Now the exact same thing is done one fret higher, whereby the index finger is now responsible for the second fret and thus the whole hand moves one fret higher.

The orange notes are again those that are not played with priority, but serve as a substitute if this one cannot be found or is simply too cumbersome to play.

Of course, this whole “technique” to learn notes is described in this book worlds better than I have done here now. But if you have understood the idea, you can also learn it alone without help.

One more little tip: If you have managed it after a while and are now with your index finger in the 5th fret or even higher, you don’t have to look too closely at the octaves anymore.

In Leavitt’s book, of course, there are nice exercises that are always perfectly matched to the “position”. But in normal life this is of course not always the case. For example, if you have a low F (E string first fret), but are currently in the 5th fret or higher, you can simply take the next higher F.

It is not 100% correct, because the octave is not the same, but it is still an F and will probably bother the fewest! 🙂