Some of the basic concepts of guitar playing have been introduced in this piece of writing. It describes lot of words and concepts that the beginner guitar player needs to pick up, and this is an ideal place to start if you are a beginner. Moreover, it will give you an insight into some of the terminologies and concepts needed to move onto some of the more complex lessons.

Octaves and Note Naming

Lets start up the process of giving names to notes. Total number of whole notes in the scales is 7. Most of them are split into half notes. We name the whole notes after letters of the alphabet, starting at A and running through to G. At G we circle back around to A once again. The notes sound the same but higher as we have moved through 8 whole notes and got back to where we initiated from. The notes having the identical name are an Octave apart. Notes that are an octave apart are equal in musical function. As A Matter Of Fact, if two notes are an octave apart, the higher note will have twice the frequency of the lower note. There are 8 notes in total, including the equivalent notes called as an octave. The doubling in frequency between Octave apart notes strikes something in our nervous system and we find this relationship sensible and enjoyable to listen. So, we commonly construct our musical scales around this concept.

Tones and Semi-tones, Flats and Sharps

It is said that there are 8 whole notes - it turns out that we also need half notes to play any possible tune. The convention of playing western music includes to put half notes between all of the whole notes except for 2 specific pairs - E,F and B,C. The question is that why do we do this? It all comes from the way that Major scales are constructed, which you can read about in later in this lessons. Musical Scales are constructed from a mixture of half and full notes depending on the scale and employment of 8 whole notes along with some half notes give us the flexibility to do this. The remarkable thing is that music notation has developed over many thousands of years, so to make perfect sense is not essential, but it soon becomes second nature when you start working with it.

The whole notes are called tones while the half notes are called semi-tones. We can name to the semitones through 2 ways. We can figure them by producing a semi-tone from a particular note, which we call a sharp, and we use the '#' sign to denote this. Or, we can figure the note by stepping down a semitone from a higher note - we name this a flat, and use the 'b' to denote this. Thus, we can discuss the notes A and B, and the note in between them which we could call A# or Bb.

Observe that certain pairs of notes do not have a semitone between them! Another means to describe all this is that there is no such note as E#, or B#, or employing the flat notation, Fb and Cb do not exist.

(Side note: In Reality there are some special circumstances in which we talk of E#, B#, Fb and Cb, but these are actually notational devices, and don't refer to additional notes. We will learn about this later).

Hence you should now realize that an octave consists of actually 12 definite semi-tones (usually known as 13 since we count the octave note as well). These are: A, A#/Bb, B, C, C#/Db, D, D#/Eb, E, F, F#/Gb, G, G#/Ab and back to A again making 13. No other notes than these exist in Western music, and every song written uses a combination of these in different octaves, and so a tune or melody is merely a sequence of semi-tones A-G# spaced apart. They are not equal to sustain some notion of rhythm.
Why the number of semitones remains 12? The simple answer is convention. A long time ago, Western music established on the 8 note scale, and utilizes half notes as the elementary basis for all musics. Some civilizations use quarter notes in their scales, but they sound to western ears. Occasionally, on guitar we use quarter note bends to add emphasis and phrasing, particularly in blues, but scales can not be built out of them.