How to Read Musical Guitar Notation

Many types of guitar music such as blues and rock is written in guitar tablature, a form of musical notation specifically designed for the guitar. Classical guitarists, on the other hand, must be able to read standard musical notation because this is how classical music is written. The following steps will show how to read standard musical notation.

Difficulty: Easy

Instructions

1. Examine the staff. This is a set of 5 horizontal lines going across the page that are parallel with each other. The clef (French for key) establishes a reference note for one of the lines on the staff.

2. Identify the G clef. It looks like a highly stylized G and the line going through the curl of the clef indicates that the note on that line is the G above middle C.

3. Examine the position of the G clef. It is on the second to bottom line in music for guitar and other treble instruments. In fact, the G clef is called the treble clef when it is in this position.

4. Learn the notes for the 5 lines of the staff for treble music. As established in Step 3, we have E, G, B, D and F starting from the bottom line and proceeding up the staff. This sequence is easily memorized with the mnemonic "every good boy does fine."

5. Study the notes for the 4 spaces between lines on the staff. Starting at the bottom space and going up, we see that these notes are F, A, C and E which spells "face."

Resources

• Learn more about playing classical guitar music.

[dhoule]

on 7/23/2008 very informative for the amature guitarist, and a must read.