FRETBOARD the D STRING

LEARN THE NOTES ON THE NECK - D String

For some mysterious reason a lot of music teachers like to do things the hard way. I can't quite work out why, maybe it's because they pride themselves on the intellect. There's a very good American Singer Guitarist called David Wilcox who plays a lot of very nice open tunings on his guitar, he uses capos and half capos. David once made a qoute, from memory I think it was in the excellent Acoustic Guitar magazine, it went something like " I had one Classical Guitar lesson and the teacher put the fear of music into me, I never went back".

Now, it's important to note hear that I'm not knocking Classical Guitar, I am very fond of the music of Narcisco Yepes and Julian Bream and am in awe of Bach. My issue is about the attitude of some music teachers being a bit snobby about other players if they don't play the same style or don't have the theory thing together.

I also am very much for guitar players the training themselves in music theory, because it's great tool to have to be able to communicate with non guitar players. The introduction of TAB is a blessing, especially for working with open tuning. The issue with tab is that the bad TAB leaves out the timing. The TAB I prefer is like what I've seen in the Bluegrass players Steve Kauffman's books. When you read it, you don't necessarily need to have heard the tune to play it.

So now I'll continue with my fretboard tutorial.

The 4th string, as you may know is the D string. And it's important to remember that when we number the strings, the 1st string is closest to the toes.

As we are continuing it's important to remember the rules don't change.

THERE ARE NO SHARPS OR FLATS BETWEEN E and F

our notes are::

D---D#---E---F---F#---G---G#---A---A#

And also as before, we are only working with SHARPS (#) and forgetting flats. By doing this it's easier to see the sequence of notes.