Learning the string names on your guitar is an absolute must; there’s no two ways about it. Understanding tones and semitones allows you to figure out what any note on your guitar is. This video hopefully will help clarify these things for you.

Download the Empty Fretboard PDF

The string names on your guitar are E-A-D-G-B-E.

Some fun acronyms you can use to remember this are:

Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie
Eat All Day Get Big Easy
Eat A Dog, Get Big Ears

Personally I just remember the letter names as is, there aren’t really that many of them.

As I said in the video, download the empty fretboard diagram above, and fill it out completely. Practice doing this once per day until you know it. I’m sure it won’t take you more than a few days before you start getting the hang of it!

As you become more familiar with the fretboard, start looking for patterns. For example, circle all the times ‘A’ appears, and see if you can see the pattern. Starting on the sixth string, you simply go up two strings and two frets, and you’ll see the octave. That pattern holds true all across the fretboard, except on the B string. What other patterns can you find?

Comments or questions are welcome -- just leave one below!

A few of you have asked me about how you can play faster, so this video on guitar speed exercises is in response to that. I realize I’m not a string shredding speed demon from Mars like some of the guys you’ll find online, but at the same time, I can play fast enough when the circumstance requires. In this video I cover a few of the basic techniques you’ll need to start boosting your speed.

First off, the most important thing to know is that you’re never going to be a fast and accurate guitar player without lots and lots of practice. (I mean ANYONE can be fast, but you want to be fast AND accurate, while sounding good, right? We’re not just talking about gluing six picks to your cordless drill and playing one note 943 times per second!)

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So you might as well get used to the fact right now that you’re going to have to practice lots to get fast. But don’t let that be a downer. Done right, practicing can be a lot of fun. Just make sure you’re getting familiar with your scales.

Secondly, the ‘down-up’ technique I mentioned in the video is ultra important. As far as guitar speed exercises go, this one is super important. If you can’t get this technique down, it WILL be a glass ceiling in your playing, and it will be hard to ever break through that without correcting bad habits.

Thirdly, if you want to sound faster than you actually are, trying using hammer-ons as I demonstrated, and use those to boost your speed, if only until you can actually catch up with your normal picking speed.

Video Trouble? Watch Guitar Speed Exercises on Youtube

If you’ve got other guitar speed exercises that work well, please leave a comment below and tell us about them!