String Names

by John Davison

www.pontefractguitarlessons.co.uk

One of the first topics I cover with beginners is the names of each string. In music we have a special 'musical alphabet'. We use this to tell us which note we are playing. This musical alphabet (in it's simplest form) is A B C D E F G. You may have heard other guitarists talking about things such as "G chords, E chords or getting that A on the E string" which probably baffled you initially. It is very important to learn where each of these notes is located on the guitar fret board. We first start by learning the names of each string, and the note it produces when played.

The diagram shows each string with it's note name in red.

Besides having a name/note each string is also assigned a number. Again you may have heard guitarists refer to their 6th string and so on. Each strings name and number is shown below.

E String - Bottom String - 6th String
A String - 5th String
D String - 4th String
G String - 3rd String
B String - 2nd String
e String - Top e String - 1st String

A lot of students initially get confused between the 'Top' and 'Bottom' strings. When you look at a guitar being played, the thickest string (E, 6th) is to the top. So naturally people may refer to it as 'Top E'. It is however the bottom E, as shown in the table above. The best way to think of it is in terms of pitch. The bottom E has a much lower pitch than the top e string.

It is also good practice to refer to the 1st string with a lowercase e. This is how it should be depicted in all professional standard tablature and is the way it appears in the RGT literature that I teach.