The 'magic' note

I've been playing guitar for quite some time—in the order of decades now—and the amazing thing is I still keep discovering things about music and the guitar. Recently I've been trying to sharpen up my knowledge of the fretboard using the Guitar Fretboard Workbook by Barrett Tagliarino. It's a good resource, from the Musician's Institute Press so you know it's from a respected source etc. But, you won't find this tip about the 'magic' note in there.

Now I've been wondering why it is that this idea which is quite obvious when you finally realise it's there, seems to be elusive for guitarists to see. I think there are two reasons:

• firstly the musical alphabet tends to be taught with C at the centre of it's universe


• secondly, the alphabet we learn in English at school starts with the letter A

These ways of thinking about the note names can tend to obscure the idea of symmetry and the musical notes. Now I'm assuming you already know the names of all 12 notes commonly used in the Western musical system. If you don't it would be beneficial to find that out ASAP if you are serious about learning more about playing music.

Eventually you will want to learn the names and positions of every note on the guitar, but you have to start somewhere. And I think that particular somewhere is D. That's the 'magic' note. So the note you should really learn in every position on the neck is D, and the reason why is the symmetry that shows up when you look at it in relationship to the other notes, particularly the pairs B-C and E-F which sit below and above D in pitch. Lets look at a diagram of one octave on the piano keyboard:


I made this up to show the symmetry around D, and to emphasise that the tricky notes B, C, E and F straddle the note D in a symmetrical relationship. Here's how those five notes look on the guitar just focussing on one string only:


Those notes are tricky because between B and C there is no B#/Cb, and between E and F there is no E#/Fb (see note below), so learning D will essentially help you to learn four more notes on the fretboard more easily. That is why I consider it's an advantage to learn D: because it helps to learn about these other quirks of the musical alphabet more easily.

This idea leads on to a few others which I will cover in the next couple of posts, so stay tuned in.

Note: B/C and E/F are separated by a semitone (one fret apart on the guitar) whereas every other natural note is separated from it's neighbouring natural notes by a whole tone. All the accidentals (the sharps/flats) are also separated from their neighbouring accidentals by at least a whole tone.