How To Read and Perform Music on the Guitar – Part 2

, ,

I’m happy to report that I had a good response to How to Read and Perform Music on the Guitar. Therefore, let’s keep going! These lessons will be cumulative. In other words, be sure to read and work on the earlier lessons. There is only one before this one, so it’ll be easy to catch up. To find it, click on view all articles by Peter Simms in my bio box.

In part #2 we are going to address String 2 (the B string). Now that you made it through the opening lesson, it should be rather easy to add 3 notes that are on the 2nd String. These notes are B, C, and D. See the chart below:

Example 1

As you can see above, we have extended the range of the notes. We have our new notes B, C, and D on the 2nd string, and we also have E, F, and G (from the opening lesson) on the 1st string.

Your goals this lesson are:

  1. learn how to “play” the notes on the 2nd string – rhythm included.
  2. learn how to “play” the notes on the 1st and 2nd string together – rhythm included.

If you can obtain these goals, you’ve doubled your capacity! Now you not only know where 6 notes are on the guitar, but you can “play” them when you see them. Yahoo!

Remember that rhythm is IMPORTANT. You could say it is more important than pitch. If you played the wrong note in the correct rhythmical spot, you made “1” mistake. If you played the correct note in the wrong rhythmical spot, you made “2” mistakes = not playing the correct note in the rhythmical spot where it was supposed to be played, and playing a note where there wasn’t supposed to be a note.

Here are two exercises for you:

The first one is a set of exercises only using the notes B, C, and D. The other one is using the combination of all 6 notes B, C, D, E, F, and G. Below are also midi examples of these various exercises:

Now that you made it through the opening lesson. I’m not going to be using TAB anymore. Yikes! It’s very difficult not to look at the TAB when it is just under the notes. Your goal is to learn how to read music. Therefore, TAB will just mess this up… Yes, you can say it now… OH NO!

This lesson should be very attainable for you to accomplish. I’m trying to make it as easy as possible to learn how to read music. If you’re having problems, email me and, based on your level, I can make some suggestions.

I also have additional practice sheets with midi examples available for your studies. Just email me and I will be more than happy to send them your way.

Have Fun!