The G string at fret 8 is the hardest note to find on the guitar fretboard
The hardest notes to find on the guitar fretboard
Over three years and 275,170 data points from the Find the Notes game, one pattern stands out: the upper middle of the neck is where players stumble most. The G string at frets 6 to 9 is the red zone, and the G string at fret 8 (E♭) is missed about a third of the time. The outer E strings and open strings are easiest, and accidentals are harder than naturals.
The single worst spot, the G string at fret 8 (E♭), is answered incorrectly about one-third of the time.
- scarecrowbob
As a person who performs a lot of music on various instruments, playing in "closed" positions where you don't know the note you're playing is a just-fine strategy.
There are reasons why folks know the names of notes in some positions better than others.
When I was playing a lot of bass for folks in low rent with bands that were playing standard music and never rehearsing, I generally only paid attention to the low string and worked my parts out (often on the fly) around the relative pitches.
If you're trying to keep up with the bass part on a song you've never heard before while performing it on stage, it's much more relevant (and far easier/faster) to know the position of the minor 3 note of the scale than it is to know what note is the minor 3.
Over the decades I play a lot more piano, and that changes. I play a lot of blues and jazz but am quite poor at reading typical rep for the instrument. While I started out mostly playing using chord fingerings (and inversions), the more I play the more specific I can get on my understanding of actual notes. Because I've been playing a lot of clarinet (which forces me to transpose a whole lot, including reading a part and transposing on the fly), the names of specific notes has gotten a whole lot more important, but also easier with practice.
On the pedal steel (which I have only been playing for a decade on and am still coming to terms with), while I can pull all that knowledge I am still usually playing based on a notes position- […]
- gchamonlive
I could never really bridge the gap between spoken language and execution on a guitar. I approach improvising and playing by intervals and shapes. For me I need to have direct access to the guitar that doesn't pass through language, as if the guitar was my mouth and I'd execute a chord or a melody as if it were a word or a sentence, without thinking about syntax.
This makes it hard to compose and study music, since I take a long time to transpose and navigate the harmonic field, but it's a tradeoff that I need to do, my brain doesn't work otherwise.
- polarbearballs
I don't think it's realistic to draw conclusions between your skill at this game and the skill at finding a real note on a real guitar. I've been playing guitar for 35 years now and note finding is almost subconscious and relies on muscle memory. This is an inverted image from what you'd see anyway. I think all you can determine from this is that some people are good at a video game versions of the memory game.
If you practice this thinking it's going to translate to guitar, your wasting time that would be better spent playing guitar.
- j5r5myk
This is fun. I have always said that a portion of my brain is dedicated to the fretboard. If I'm talking about intervals without an instrument in front of me I am always imagining the fretboard to find, say, a minor 6th from C#. I know the shapes of octaves across different strings very well, so even in the red zones I can find the notes pretty quickly. I cannot say the same for many of my bandmates, as talented as they are.
Would you please add a non Google sign up?
- dofm
The funny thing is that as a lap steel player, the middle to upper middle of the neck (5 through to 9) is where you live, because it interacts most usefully with the open strings in most tunings. Same is true of bottleneck slide to some extent.