The staff for a guitarist: five things that are enough

You do not need to read music to play round a campfire. But somebody will hand you a melody on paper, or you will switch the notation on next to the Tab in one of our songs. Then it helps to know what is going on there. It turns out that on a guitar five things are enough, and all five fit into one read. The rest you pick up along the way, or never, and nothing bad happens.

There is one clef and it never changes

A pianist reads two clefs at once, you read one: the treble clef. That curl at the front of the staff is the same in every guitar piece there is. You can treat it as a logo on the page and stop thinking about it.

One thing here is worth remembering, because it explains a surprise later on: a guitar sounds an octave lower than it is written. The same note played on a piano comes out higher. It is done so that the whole guitar fits on one staff instead of two. That is also why you sometimes see a clef with a small 8 underneath it.

Five lines and four spaces, and the names never move

You read left to right like a book, and the higher a note sits, the higher it sounds. The lines from the bottom are E, G, B, D, F, and the spaces from the bottom are F, A, C, E, which spells the word FACE. English courses teach the lines with the sentence “Every Good Boy Does Fine”, and Polish editions have their own sentence for the same five letters. Both of them spell out the English note names, so the second line is a B.

The same trap comes back here as with the string names. We write B, while Polish and German songbooks write H in that place and keep the letter B for the note a semitone lower. So if you ever see the lines labelled e, g, h, d, f, it is the same notation in a different alphabet.

Notes that do not fit on the five lines get their own short dashes above or below the staff. They are called ledger lines and they mean nothing more than “the staff is too short here”.

The six open strings have fixed addresses on the staff

This is the one table worth learning by heart, because everything else is counted from it. The “sounds” column gives the note you hear, and the column beside it says where that note sits on the page. They differ by an octave, which is not a mistake in the table, it is the same octave you read about above.

string	sounds	on the staff
1, thinnest (e)	E4	fourth space, the top one
2 (B)	B3	third line, the middle one
3 (G)	G3	second line from the bottom
4 (D)	D3	the space just below the staff
5 (A)	A2	second ledger line below
6, thickest (E)	E2	fourth space below

The digit after the letter only says which octave a note lives in. E2 from the thickest string and E4 from the thinnest are the same letter, two octaves apart. Tap both in the widget below and you will hear how far apart they are.

A sharp raises by one fret, a flat lowers by one fret

A sharp in front of a note raises it by a semitone, and a semitone on a guitar is exactly one fret. A flat lowers it by the same amount, and a natural cancels both. The sign applies to every note of that name until the end of the bar, not only to the one it stands in front of. That is the easy part to forget.

While you are at it, remember the two pairs that sit next to each other with no sign between them: E and F, and B and C. On the neck they are neighbouring frets, so if you are hunting for an F, it is the fret right after E.

The time signature says how much you count, the bar line says when to start again

The two figures at the front are the time signature. The top one says how many beats fit in a bar, the bottom one says which note value gets the beat. So 4/4 is four quarter notes, 3/4 is three, and 6/8 is six eighths. The notes in a bar have to add up to exactly that, and then you draw a vertical bar line. A double line at the end means the piece is over.

Why bother, when you already have tab

Because tab and the staff answer different questions and neither replaces the other. Tab tells you where to put your finger, and it does that perfectly, because it names a string and a fret. The staff tells you how high the note is and how long it lasts, and tab simply does not carry that.

In our song view you do not have to choose: the notation and the Tab sit side by side and both highlight in time. You look at the numbers and take the rhythm from the moving highlight and from the notes above them. It is the cheapest way of learning to read that I know: you do not study notation, you just look at it for a week while you play.

What confused me

For my first month I hunted for one single place on the neck for every note. The E in the top space of the staff sits on the fifth fret of the second string and on the open first string, and it is exactly the same note. Once that landed I stopped looking for the right place and started choosing the comfortable one. Until then it is worth reading in the first position, near the nut, because that is where the choices are fewest.

The second one was two different octaves rolled into one. The whole guitar sounds an octave below what is written, because that is how it is built. Separately from that you sometimes see 8va over a passage, which tells you to play that passage an octave higher than printed. For a week I thought these were the same thing.