READING NOTES ON THE GUITAR (Page 3 and 4)

Reading notes on the guitar can seem overwhelming, but if you follow the progression on StartUp Classical Guitar, you will be reading in no time!

HERE ARE THE ANSWERS TO PAGE 4:

Mi

La

Re

Sol

Si

Mi

Remember that like all skills, you need to give some time for practice and development. If skills were so easy to learn, everybody would be a professional at everything.

First you will need to be familiar with the musical staff. (As seen on page 4)

Imagine that the staff is an open staircase. The notes reside on either a line or a space. A step UP is a note or pitch higher and a step DOWN is a note or pitch Lower.

On the diagram below, you can see the notes stepping from line to space, to another line and space. These are ascending notes that repeat after every 7 notes.

Are you familiar with the sequence : Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Si? These are the only notes you will need to memorise as they repeat but in different ranges.

The OPEN strings (Strings you do not need to press) are highlighted in RED. The notes in between are the notes you will be learning later on. Please concentrate on memorising the red notes first.

Take Your Time

Review the exercises on the Open string Page and memorise them before moving on. Concentrate on good tone, good position, and good technique.

Notes on the neck

The natural notes are reoccurring on the neck of the guitar. There are 2 basic intervals we can start with so you can understand the movement of natural notes.

An interval is the distance between two notes. A half step or semi-tone is when the notes are next to each other. If you observe the diagram above, you can see that Mi and Fa and Si and Do are always right next to each other. A whole step or whole tone is when you have two half step in between notes. You can observe that between Fa and Sol, Re and Mi, and many others.

The trick: Just remember that Mi to Fa and Si to Do have half steps in between. The rest of the notes are whole tones in between. Observe the 6th string below.

Follow the flow

Play the simple open-note melodies alone or with a friend/teacher. Always play the TOP line for now. When you feel ready to learn the next notes, you can move on to page 9 and so on.

In time you will be able to read the accompaniment but be patient! Classical Guitar is really not an easy instrument.