The Chromatic Scale on Guitar

Semitones on Guitar

Remember the frets we talked about earlier? Each fret is a semitone away from the one before.

The ‘zero-th’ fret (playing the string without pressing a fret) is also a semitone from the first.

Go ahead and play the open strings, starting from the 6th string. Recall that this is the thickest one.

That’s the E string. The one below it is the A string.

Next is the D string.

Then the G string.

Followed by the B string.

And then finally another E string, 2 octaves above the first. For convenience, we call this the High E string, while the sixth string is the Low E string.

That gives us EADGBE.

As you're learning guitar, this is probably the most important thing to remember - it'll help you immensely when you start improvising. A fun acronym to remember the open string notes (from thickest to thinnest) is "Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie!"

Like I mentioned earlier, each fret moves up a semitone. So the 1st fret on the 1st string is an F, then F# then G and so on.

The full chromatic scale, starting from C (played on the 2nd string) looks like this:

Pop quiz - which fret (or frets) plays E on the 5th string?

Answer

The open 5th string plays A. We need 7 semitones to get to E (A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E) which means the 7th fret of the 5th string will play E.

But we also said that twelve semitones bring us up an octave, so the 19th fret would also play E.

Experiment around - try playing different notes on different strings. See if you can play the same note on all the strings.