Preparing to Play: Strings, Frets, & Notes

A quick tour of the frets and strings will set us up to tune our guitars.

If you hold a six-stringed guitar in the manner described in the last three posts (correct posture, left hand position, and right hand position):

the frets are numbered starting from one (just proximal to the nut), and increasing by one after each fret bar closer to the sound hole (‘higher up’) you get

the strings are numbered as follows (from bottom to top): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

string identities are as follows (from top to bottom): low E, A, D, G, B, high E (i.e. the first string is high E, and the sixth string is low E). The mnemonic “Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie” may be helpful at first.

What do these identity letters mean? If you already have a background in music theory (the language, grammar, and punctuation of music), you can skip to the next post.

A Primer on Musical Notes

Sound is produced by vibration (e.g. of a string on a guitar). The faster (higher frequency) the vibration, the higher-pitched the resulting sound.

Musicians assign each pitch (note) an alphabetic name. There are seven notes in order of ascending pitch: A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. The notes don’t stop at G: you can keep increasing the pitch. BUT! the next note after G is named A again, because – although it has a higher pitch – it has the same sonic character as the starting A. Specifically, the higher A is the eighth note above the starting A: it is an ‘octave’ higher.

To demonstrate how notes an octave away from each other share the same sonic character, pick up a tuned guitar and play the low E and high E strings separately, then simultaneously. Now try playing an E string and any other string separately, then simultaneously. The E’s sound the same as each other.

No matter how low down or high up you are on a keyboard or fretboard, the distance (‘interval’) between one note and the next note with the same name (e.g. from A to A) is always an octave.

String length, tension, diameter, and density all affect vibration frequency: shorter, tighter, thinner, lower density strings vibrate at a higher frequency (producing a higher-pitched sound), and vice versa. All the strings on a guitar are of an equal length (they travel the same distance from the nut to the bridge). However, they do have different diameters and densities to help them achieve their intended/desired pitch when their tension is altered via the tuning pegs.

Play an open (un-fretted) string on a tuned guitar (the low E, for instance). The pitch is low because a relatively relaxed string vibrates relatively slowly. The pitch of the high E string is much higher, because its higher tension produces a faster vibration.

When you fret a string, you effectively shorten it, which increases pitch. Shortening any vibrating string to exactly half its original length produces an octave’s worth of pitch increase. Shortening a string by less than half produces proportionally less of a pitch increase. Notice how the tighter you wind a string (i.e. the higher its tension), and the higher up you fret it (i.e. the shorter its length), the higher the pitch gets.

Shortening a vibrating string to increase pitch is analogous to a phenomenon you have undoubtedly already encountered: reducing the volume of water in a vibrating glass (the less water in a glass, the faster it is able to vibrate, and the higher the resulting pitch). Check out this mesmerising video of a guy playing Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah using only water glasses:

Voice Pitch

These principles of vibration also explain gender-based voice pitch differences. Testosterone causes vocal chords to become thicker and longer, which can drop voice pitch by as much as an octave. Why have humans evolved this way? It’s thought that deep male voices were selected for over large timescales because they are more intimidating to other males. Some studies also report that women find lower-pitched male voices more attractive (and vice versa), but other studies fail to replicate this. Although lower voices don’t correlate with testosterone level, they do correlate with a lower cortisol level: women may use voice as a proxy for the physiological health of potential mates. You can listen to the ideal (digital) male and female voices identified by one study here.

I do also remember another study in which aging women tended to lose their ability to hear lower pitches, while men tended to lose their ability to hear higher pitches. So basically heterosexual couples will be sitting around in their old age thinking their partners never listen. Except, hopefully, to each other’s guitar music 😉

P.S. Song of the day: Heartbeats by Jose Gonzalez

If you like Heartbeats, please consider helping to support this blog by getting it here.

guitar anatomy and string stuff

tuning the guitar