Don't Fret The Guitar
by Joel Bourque

"Wa-hooooo!" That's Les Miles speech for Happy New Year!  Yes, 2008 finds LSU the undisputed champions of college football. I hope 2008 finds you all happy and healthy. This new year finds me a little older, a little wiser and sadly, a little balder. Being it's January, the beginning of the year, I thought now would be a good time to talk about music theory's beginning, the musical alphabet.

English is a language, written and spoken. A book is several chapters put together in a sequence. Chapters are a bunch of paragraphs, paragraphs are formed by sentences, sentences are made of words, words are made from letters, the letters come from the alphabet. Music is a language, written, heard and performed. An album(Do they even call it that anymore?) is made up of a group of songs. A song is a group of chords in a certain order. Chords are made from notes. And where do these notes come from? The musical alphabet. Here goes...

The musical alphabet consists of 7 different letter names and sharps and flats, the 7 letter names are :A B C D E F G. These notes are known as “natural notes.”  Sharps (noted by the pound sign,#) and flats (noted by a lower case b) are known as accidentals. There are a total of 12 notes in musical alphabet. There are 2 ways to list these notes, with sharps: A ,A#, B ,C, C# ,D, D# ,E ,F, F# ,G, G# and with flats: A, Bb, B, C, Db, D, Eb, E, F, Gb, G, Ab. This alphabet repeats itself over and over, becoming higher or lower in pitch. The important thing to notice here is the fact that there are no sharps or flats between the notes, B and C ,and E and F. Now let's relate this to the guitar.

You know those dots and frets all over the neck of your guitar? They look pretty cool huh? Yes they do, but they are there for another reason. They are little landmarks on the fret board that let you know where you are. Let's start with the 6th string (the thickest string). This is the E string, meaning that when this string is played in open position (not fretted) it is the E note. We are going to start with sharps for now. If you were to fret (press down) the 1st fret on the 6th string, it would be F, the 2nd fret would be F#, the 3rd would be G and so on. Each fret represents 1 note. As you work your way up the guitar neck the notes get higher in pitch. When you reach th 12th fret (usually the double dots on the neck), it starts all over. We're back at E, this is known as an octave. An octave is 2 identical notes, just higher or lower in pitch. In this case, the E on the 12th fret is one octave higher than the open E. The E string is good to know up and down the neck because many chords are rooted on that particular string.

That's a bunch of numbers and letters for you to wrap your head and hands around. Just take it slow and learn that 6th string from its open position up to the 12th fret, backwards and forwards. I'll talk more about this stuff next month. The better you learn the neck, the easier it will be to learn songs and the faster you will become a Rockstar!. Cheers!