Page 6 - Guitar Book

Fretboard & Strings

Fretboard and Strings

OK, now we know what a guitar is, what it looks like and all it’s bits and pieces,
lets take a look at a few important bits. The real business bit is the fretboard.
If you take a look at it you will see the space between the frets are bigger at
the top than they are at the bottom, don’t worry this is quite normal, you
haven’t been ripped off with a duff guitar. However the significance of this
to us is very simple. It’s all to do with the string tonation (or, what the strings
sound like at different positions on the fretboard). In any case, this doesn’t
concern us at the moment so don’t pay too much attention to it. What we are
concerned with is what each space represents on the fretboard.

E A D G B E
Lets have a look at the fretboard and get an idea of
what it does:

Right, if you stand your guitar on its base and face
it towards you the fret board will look something
like this diagram. The thick string should now be
on the left. If it isn’t, turn the guitar the right way
up!!

If you look at the dots going down you’ll notice that
at the bottom there are two on the same fret. This
indicates the last fret in it’s scale. Don’t worry, you’ll
know what I’m on about very soon. There are more
frets after this but they are not too important now.

Time to confuse you a little more now, the thickest
string is known as the bottom while the thinnest is
known as the top. This is worked out by the notes
that the string are tuned to. You’ll notice that the
two outside strings have a letter E above them. The
thickest is the low E note and the thinnest is the
High E note, hence top and bottom.

Each of the other letters represents the note the
particular string is tuned to in ascending order.

| 06