{"id":2487,"date":"2014-09-09T14:44:30","date_gmt":"2014-09-09T19:44:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/blog\/?p=2487"},"modified":"2025-02-13T04:51:43","modified_gmt":"2025-02-13T10:51:43","slug":"my-struggle-how-i-triumphed-learning-and-remembering-the-notes-on-the-guitar-without-the-struggle-by-philip-glaser-strings-by-mail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/my-struggle-how-i-triumphed-learning-and-remembering-the-notes-on-the-guitar-without-the-struggle-by-philip-glaser-strings-by-mail\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning and Remembering the Notes on the Guitar"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Struggle & How I Triumphed:\u00a0 Learning and Remembering the Notes on the Guitar \u2013 without <\/span>the Struggle <\/b>\u00a0by Philip Glaser<\/h2>\n

\"Philip's<\/a><\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s note – <\/i>Solid reading skills are the key to using the many fine available Etudes, these cards will jump start anyone\u2019s efforts to establish excellent reading skills, as Philip\u2019s story makes clear.<\/i><\/p>\n

I\u2019m an amateur guitar player, not a performer or a guitar teacher.\u00a0 I do like to make videos of my playing for YouTube\u2013 mostly of classical guitar pieces.<\/p>\n

Back in 2004, I could read guitar music, but not very well when it involved notes beyond the 4th<\/sup> fret of the guitar.\u00a0 I was seeing a guitar teacher regularly, and I was also going slowly through Frederick Noad\u2019s very good book, \u201cSolo Guitar Playing, volume 1.\u201d<\/p>\n

In that book, when I got to the chapters covering learning the notes on the 5th<\/sup> and 7th<\/sup> positions, (5th<\/sup> fret and higher), I really got bogged down.\u00a0 I did the exercises in the book again and again, but I just couldn\u2019t seem to remember the notes very well.\u00a0 I kept coming back to the exercises in those two chapters \u2013 I could play the exercises, but remembering the notes was something else.<\/p>\n

My guitar teacher gave me a suggestion about learning the notes on the fretboard \u2013 I remember her saying \u201cWhen you come for the lesson next week, show me where all of the A notes are, on the guitar.\u00a0 I managed to do that, but that method didn\u2019t help me a lot.\u00a0 I needed to do something systematically \u00a0and on a daily basis to learn the notes, so I tried memorizing the notes fret by fret, looking at a chart that showed all the notes on the guitar fretboard.<\/p>\n

That was also a frustrating and tedious experience, and didn\u2019t help a lot.\u00a0 Then I got the idea of making a set of flash cards –\u00a0 one card for each note on the guitar \u2013 and using the cards every day to test myself in recognizing each individual note, saying what letter note it is and where it is on the guitar, and then \u2013 very important \u2013 playing that note.\u00a0 Just a small number of cards each day \u2013 but testing myself every <\/span>day.<\/p>\n

The repetition of seeing and using these cards every day was the answer to my problem. This system is the same as that of using language flash cards. The repetition<\/span> of seeing the cards and testing yourself with them guarantees<\/span> that you learn.<\/p>\n

With guitar flash cards, you see the notes on the cards again and again, and what you see again and again are exactly the same notes that you\u2019ll see when you look at a printed guitar arrangement.\u00a0 I like to say, now, that when I look at the notes in a guitar arrangement, I\u2019m kind of looking at \u201cold friends\u201d \u2013 the same notes that I saw every day, with the cards.\u00a0 This method changed my (guitar) life.\u00a0 I can now easily play from printed guitar arrangements.<\/p>\n

When a guitar playing friend of mine happened to mention that he can play only from tablature, and that he can\u2019t read guitar music, I thought that my cards might also be the answer for him. I also noticed on YouTube the number of people looking at videos about learning the notes on the fretboard, and from their comments, I could see that many, many people do wish that they could be able to read guitar music, and get beyond just using tablature.\u00a0 So I had the cards printed not too long ago, and I\u2019m very happy to now have them listed on the great \u201cStrings by Mail<\/a>\u201d website.<\/p>\n

My name is Philip, so I \u201cmodestly\u201d called my cards \u201cPhilip\u2019s Learn ALL the Notes on the Guitar Flash Cards<\/a>(Up to and including the 12th<\/sup> fret).\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Struggle & How I Triumphed:\u00a0 Learning and Remembering the Notes on the Guitar \u2013 without the Struggle \u00a0by Philip Glaser Editor\u2019s note – Solid reading skills are the key to using the many fine available Etudes, these cards will jump start anyone\u2019s efforts to establish excellent reading skills, as Philip\u2019s story makes clear. I\u2019m […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guitar-tips-tricks","category-teaching-and-education"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2487"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3663,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2487\/revisions\/3663"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.stringsbymail.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}