Whenever you play a chord or a group of notes together at once, there's always a dominant sound that rings through. This sound is created by the root note(s).
The root note is the building block of a chord. The other notes that are played provide "color" to the root note.
For example, let's say that in this chord, the root notes are the two C's. They're the foundation of the chord's sound. The purpose of the other notes is to support these two root notes and add flavor or a different feel to the overall sound.
So, under every chord are root notes. However, what's cool is that the way root notes are displayed on a guitar fretboard isn't random.
Actually, there are five patterns that repeat along the fretboard, each connecting to one another. These five patterns allow you to find where all the root notes are on the entire fretboard, for any note that you choose as your root note.
Unfortunately, there's no way to get around having to memorize these patterns, but trust us -- it's really simple and well worth the effort. To help, we'll teach you how we think about these shapes when trying to memorize them.
To demonstrate, let's look again at choosing "C" as our root note:
Pattern one is 3 strings down, 2 frets over, starting on the B string.
This first pattern is easily remembered by comparing it to a common "C" chord's shape. A "C" chord looks like this:
So whenever you have a note on on the 2nd string, what you can do is make the shape of a "C" chord and remember that the other root note is where you would have normally placed your ring finger down for that "C".
Pattern two is 2 strings up, 2 frets over, on the A string.
Our second pattern is one of the easier ones to remember. If you've learned any punk rock songs, this shape will already look familiar to you because guitarists commonly use this shape to create power chords by muting the string inbetween:
Pattern three is 2 strings up, 3 frets over, and 3 strings down, 3 frets over, on the G string .
The nice part about memorizing this pattern is that you really only need to memorize one of these routes -- the 1st string and 6th string are both E strings, so the notes on either string are always going to be the same. Basically, once you see that a root note is on the 1st string, you automatically get the root note on the 6th string for "free", and vice versa.
Therefore, you can remember the top portion by seeing that it's an "L" shape, and then just add in the root note on the 6th string afterwards.
Pattern four is 3 strings down, 2 frets over, or 2 strings up, 2 frets over, on the E strings.
Similarly to pattern two, we end up with a power chord shape here, but starting on the 6th string instead:
Just remember that since we have a root note on the 6th string, we'll also have one on the 1st string because the strings are equivalent.
Pattern five is 2 strings up, 3 frets over, starting on the D string.
There are a couple ways you can think about memorizing this shape. You might think of the "L" shape again, or see it as the same as Root Pattern 3, but with everything shifted down by one string.
... and here are all the root patterns connected together! After the 13th fret, the pattern just repeats over again until you run out of frets to work with.
We mentioned that we chose a "C" for our root notes, but we can choose any note at all and these patterns still apply. Let's look at a random note, an F:
We begin with pattern four here instead of one, but you can see all the patterns still apply and cycle in order. Let's look at a "D" now:
With a "D" as our root note, we start on an open string, but using pattern five, we can connect it with the other patterns to find all the other D's.
Every root note pattern starts on a different string, so there shouldn't be any confusion as to which pattern to apply. Just memorize the shapes and you'll be able to find all the other root notes on your fretboard!
Now you're probably wondering how memorizing these patterns is even remotely useful besides as a cool party trick. Well, one practical use is being able to locate any note you want on the fretboard (and consequently being able to name any note on the fretboard).
Let's say you're jamming with another llama and trying to play along with him, and you notice he presses his clunky llama hoof on the 2nd string/8th fret.
Now before knowing these patterns, you'd probably have to count up 8 frets from the open B string and think to yourself, "0: B, 1: C, 2: C#, 3: D, 4: D#, 5: E, 6: F, 7: F#, 8: ...okay got it, G!" in order to know what he's playing.
Alternatively, you could take a slightly easier route and count 5 frets backwards from the 12th fret because you know it's also a B, but doing this is still too many steps. Here's where root patterns come in.
Looks like it's root pattern 1!
Using the next pattern, we reach the 3rd string/12th fret. However, we know that this is an octave of the open string note (G), so that means that this 12th fret is also a G, and therefore so is the note we were trying to figure out before!
Using root notes, we were able to figure out what this note was in only two steps, which is much faster than what we were doing before.
Let's do one more...
Working backwards with our patterns, we see that we can use part of root pattern 3.
From here, we know that the open 5th string is an "A", so counting up one fret (one half step), we know that our original note was an "A#".
The best way to really solidify this information is to do a couple on your own. Try to solve these by applying the patterns. Click the connecting root notes to help with finding the note.
1. What note is the 5th string/7th fret?
2. What note is the 3rd string/8th fret?
3. What note is the 4th string/5th fret?
4. What note is the 2nd string/9th fret?
5. What note is the 1st string/5th fret?
6. What note is the 6th string/5th fret?
Congratulations, you're well on your way to mastering your fretboard. Now let's use what we've learned so far to get on to the holy grail of music theory - the major scale.
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