Steve Rieck: Well, the great thing about a guitar is how visual it is in terms of shapes and patterns. A lot of guitar players who have played for many years, seem to get around and become really good players simply by just moving shapes around and understanding patterns and visualizing stuff on the fret board. Without and in a lot of cases really knowing a whole lot about where the notes are and so if you are the kind of guitar player that really wants to know where your notes are on the fret board, that's certainly one approach and for me, and other guitar players, it's an important one, to really get down. It's okay if you are an intermediate guitar player and you really don't care where the notes are, that's not -- it's not a bad way to go but if you really want to take it to the next level, you really need to know where the notes are.
So I want to kind of use this tutorial to explain that to you slowly and it's going to be fairly painstaking. There really isn't a magic wand for this, but I am going to hopefully do it slowly and carefully enough that it should all make sense, by the time you are done with it. And the first thing I want to explain is concept of whole steps and half steps, and so the first seven letters of the alphabet A, B, C, D, E, F, and G are really what we make the musical alphabet out of. Never a nature, any is or any of that stuff, so it's always A, B, C, D, E, F, and G in terms of the actual notes.
To understand this we are going to need to understand the concept, another important guitar concept of whole steps and half steps. If you are not familiar with those, a whole step is the distance of two frets. So if I were to let's say play the third fret on the sixth string to the fifth fret, that would be an example of a whole step up. We are a whole step down, would be the opposite, the fifth to the third, maybe the third down to the first fret, those are whole steps, two frets. And a half step therefore would be one fret. So, if I went from the third up to the fourth fret that's going to be up one half steps and down fourth to third or third to second, down a half step.
So whole steps and the half steps, and there's a universal pattern that's always true for all musical instruments, at least western instruments and that is the A to B, the note A to the note B, it's always a whole step. And you might want to write these down if you don't have this memorized already; A to B is a whole step, B to C is always going to be a half step, a C to a D is always going to be a whole step, a D to an E is always an whole step. And E to an F is a half step and F to G is a whole step and then G to an A is a whole step.
And so what that means for us if we are starting with the sixth string, in this case, it's tuned to an open E. And I remember when I started out on guitar; I would be a little confused with that first fret, I didn't realize that it was a different note entirely than the open string. So when you start with that open first string, that E, F being one half step above E as it always it is, is therefore at the first fret. So this first fret on the sixth string is F, F to G is a whole step so G is at the third fret. G to A is a whole step, so A is at the fifth fret. A to B is a whole step so B is at the seventh fret. B to C is a half step, remember B to C and E to F are half steps, so therefore C is at the eighth fret. C to D is a whole step at the tenth fret, and D to E is a whole step at the twelfth fret. And that twelfth fret we would say is one octave higher than the open string.
Remember this was open E down here and we got all the way back around to the note E, one octave higher the twelfth fret, and so the term octave refers to eight of something. And what that really means is eight alphabetic letters that we just covered E, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7. 8 alphabetic letters and those are the natural notes up and down the sixth strings. By natural notes I mean we are referring to sharps and flats yet. We will cover those in a later episode. And those sharps and flats, so you understand would be the notes that we skipped over as we went up. So from F to G, we obviously skipped that second fret which we will talk about later.
And so that's the six string notes, again E, F, G, A at the fifth fret, B at the seventh fret, C at the eighth fret, D at the tenth fret, and E at the twelfth fret. And you could do that as a simple exercise both up and down the string calling the notes out loud. If you do that maybe a minute a day, it would payoff after a week, you know what called. And for the next episode we will look at the next string, the fifth string.
Alex Lifeson Rush: Hi! This is Alex Lifeson Rush and today we are going to work on The Spirit of Radio. It starts at the F sharp which is the second fret on the high E string and it's.
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