Guitar

How the guitar makes sound

On an acoustic guitar, when you pluck a string, its vibration passes through the bridge into the wooden top of the guitar. The top and the air inside the body resonate, and the sound comes out of the sound hole. An electric guitar uses pickups and an amplifier instead.

Thicker strings play lower notes and thinner strings play higher notes.

Standard tuning

Strings are numbered from the thinnest (string 1) to the thickest (string 6). In standard tuning, the strings are tuned a perfect 4th apart, except for G to B, which is a major 3rd.

Frets are semitones

Moving your finger up one fret raises the note by one semitone. This makes the guitar a great way to see intervals: a tone is two frets, a minor 3rd is three frets, and so on.

So if you know a string's open note, you can work out every note on that string by counting frets.

How guitar music is written

The guitar is an octave transposing instrument: its music is written one octave higher than it really sounds. This keeps most notes on the stave instead of below it on lots of ledger lines.

So a written middle C (C4) on guitar actually sounds as C3.

Reading TAB

TAB (tablature) is a guitar-only way of writing music. It has six lines, one for each string: the top line is the thin high E string and the bottom line is the thick low E string.

A number on a line tells you which fret to press on that string, and 0 means play the string open. Most TAB does not show rhythm, so it is often printed under ordinary notation or learned along with a recording.

Chord boxes

A chord box (chord diagram) is a picture of part of the fretboard. Vertical lines are strings, with the low E on the left, and horizontal lines are frets.

Dots show where to put your fingers. An o above a string means play it open, and an x means do not play it (mute it).

Using a capo

A capo is a clamp that presses across all the strings at one fret. It acts like a new nut, raising the pitch of the open strings.

This lets you play familiar chord shapes in a higher key. For example, C, F and G7 shapes played with a capo at the 4th fret sound as E, A and B7.