Hi there,

So we’ve covered CAGED chords, a bit of strumming and theory so far.

Now this is all well and good but it’s important for everything to sink in that you know your notes on the fretboard to find your way around.

You’ll be shown how to learn the notes on the neck in the most constructive way using Octave shapes.

Here is a picture of the fretboard – notice how there are 2 names for the same notes i.e. A# and Bb – these are called ‘enharmonic notes’

Most music is organized into keys and some keys will have sharps (#) and some keys will have flats (b) so it depends on what key your in to determine what you call it.

As you can see from the diagram a lot of notes appear quite a few times. These are the same notes but sound slightly higher or lower as they resonate at different frequencies. These are your octaves.

Now I’ve come up with a system so that you can learn every single note by jumping from one octave shape to the next:

What we’ve done here is go from the 1st fret on the E (1st) string, down to the 6th string and followed these 6 octave shapes.

Depending what note’s you want to practice will determine what color octave to choose. Let’s take C for example:

So as the first C on the neck was on the B string we chose the orange shape octave to go down to the A string.

They always follow in order, it just depends on what string your first note is. Let’s take one more, D :

So as you can see Orange always follows on from green, brown after yellow, it just depends on which notes you’re practicing.

One of the issues with most beginners is when they want to work out a different chord or where to start a scale, their knowledge of the neck slows them down.

After practicing this regular you should be able to pick any note at random then play all of them on the neck in about 10 seconds.

Many thanks for reading and hope you found it useful.

rock n roll

For other tips you can find me @jsmusicschool on twitter

James Schofield