One area of learning that budding guitar players consistently find difficult is finding their way around the guitar neck and identifying the positions of the notes. Although learning the guitar neck, a good place to start your studies is the piano keyboard. The advantage of learning this way is that there are black and white notes which are useful for orientation.

The musical alphabet uses the notes from A to G, the first 7 notes of the regular alphabet. On the piano keyboard, the note of C is always directly to the left of the group of 2 black notes, the white notes following this to the right are D, E, F, G, A and B. We can now see that the note F is always directly to the left of the group of 3 black notes.

This snippet of information is extremely useful when finding your way around the keyboard.

Guitarists have no such aids, and another problem is that notes of the same musical pitch can be played in different fret positions and on different strings.

If we look at the keyboard again we can see that the black keys fall between the white keys in all positions, apart from between the notes B and C, and the notes E and F.

If we can remember this little fact, then transferring the notes to the guitar neck, and finding our way around the neck will be very easy.

As we now know the names and positions of the all the notes on the white keys on the keyboard, we now need a name for the notes on the black keys. We name these in one of 2 ways. If we are playing each note on the keyboard from left to right we name the black keys / notes in between the 2 white notes as a SHARP, the symbol for this is #. If we are playing the notes on the keyboard from right to left we name the notes on the black keys in between the white keys as FLAT, the symbol for this is similar to a lower case b. The notes sound remains exactly the same.

These notes are called ENHARMONIC which simply means the same note with a different name.

To save any confusion from now on I will always refer to the enharmonic notes as sharps.

We can now see that the sequence of notes on the keyboard are C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B, C and so on.

Now it is time to transfer our new found knowledge to the guitar fretboard. To start with we need to commit the open string names to memory. My favourite way of doing this is to remember the sentence Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie.

The initial letters give us the names of the notes. E, A, D, G, B, E. Now if we relate each fret on the guitar neck to the notes on the keyboard we can work out which notes are where.

Let's try with the 6th string. As we have learnt this is the low E string. Remember that on the keyboard the notes E and F are next to each other, so this means the note of F is on the first fret of this 6th string.

On the keyboard we then had a black note between the F and G, so therefore the 2nd fret of the 6th string is F#, next on the 3rd fret we have the G note, followed by what is another black note on the keyboard, this means that G# is on the next fret which is the 4th. See if you can now work out the names of the notes as you work your way, fret by fret, up the guitar neck towards the 12th fret.

When you reach the 12th fret you will notice that you have reached another E. This is known as the OCTAVE. All the notes now repeat themselves as you continue up the neck. The 13th fret is the same note as the 1st fret; the 14th frets name is the same as the 2nd fret and so on.

Try this technique with each string in turn and you should soon be able to name the notes all over the neck. I would suggest making a special effort to remember the notes on the two lowest strings at the start. The E and A strings.

You can do this by learning the notes in pairs. I use another mnemonic technique to make this easier. If we take a look at the 3rd fret for example the notes on the 6th an 5th strings are G and C. What I now suggest you do, is think of a person whose name has the initials G and C and relate this to the number 3 for the 3rd fret. I came up with the old film actor Gary Cooper. To remember the number 3 I think of the shape that the figure makes, which reminds me of a snake. I then make an image in my mind of Gary Cooper swaggering down a dusty, deserted street in the old west. His hands are poised over his guns and he is staring straight ahead. From around the corner slithers a horrible looking, big fat sickly yellow coloured snake wearing a Stetson, with a 6 shooter in its mouth which is stopping it hissing. I know this may sound a bit bizarre, but the more ridiculous, big bold, and outrageous we make these mental images the easier they are to remember.

The 11 images I use to remember the numbers are

1. Pencil

2. Swan

3. Snake

4. Yacht

5. Hook

6. Elephants trunk

7. Boomerang

8. Fat Lady ( a hark back to my bingo playing days)

9. Balloon on a string

10. Laurel and Hardy

11. Two Chopsticks

You can use this technique to remember the notes even when you haven't got the guitar in your hands. It takes a long time for me to write down the technique and for you to read it. But the mental pictures are formed in fractions of a second. When you get to the 5th fret you need an association between the letters A and D, the 7th fret the notes are B and E. The 8th frets letters are C and F and the 10th frets are D and G. As you already know the notes then repeat from the 12th fret onwards.

I purposely skipped over the notes on the 1st fret as this involves using a sharp; the notes are F and A#. This is not a problem though, I just imagine the person that I visualised Fatty Arbuckle, with a tiny pencil sharpener trying to sharpen a big fat bright blue pencil.

Although this visualisation method may seem a bit strange, it does work. If you make your mental images as far away from normality as possible, you will soon find the notes on the guitar very difficult to forget.