Even if it might seem intimidating, learning the
guitar fretboard is an essential step to learning the
guitar.
Relax, if you take it one step at a time and keep practicing you'll be well on your way to discovering some of its magic quickly.
And as you continue in your adventure of learning guitar, you'll find that it has a lot more thought behind it than you would have probably guessed the first time you looked at it.
I'll show how by learning just one part of the neck and with a little practice you can transpose the part you know to the rest of the fretboard. The part you need to learn are the notes contained inside one octave in the western music system. Twelve notes that represent the sounds (notes) between one note (the root) and a note that is at twice the frequency (the octave - it is in fact a more high pitch double of the root).
If you play each fret from the first to the twelfth on the thickest string you will have played the chromatic scale starting in E. When you play the big string without your fingers touching the fretboard, you are playing an E note. Here are the notes starting on the open "E" string:
Those are all the notes in the order you'll come upon them if you move one fret at a time up the guitar neck. If you were to keep going past the 12th fret you would simply keep going around the loop and the 13th fret would be...That's right! It would be an F.
Knowing that the second string from the top of the neck is the "A" string, you would be right if you guessed that to continue using this pattern you would simply start A for the open string, A#/Bb for the first fret etc...
To apply this pattern to all the strings you simply have to know the name of the note you get when you play the open string:
This should be enough to get you started on your way to understanding the guitar fretboard. If it seems like too much to learn where all the notes are on every string one good trick could be to start by just learning the names of the notes for the frets that have a circles in them (generally 3-5-7-9-12 on most guitars) and use these as references to "calculate" the names of the frets in between once you know the chromatic scale by heart.
So get to your guitar and start to practice naming the notes as you play them on the fretboard. In time this will get easier and will give you a solid foundation on which to build the rest of your guitar knowledge.
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