Eric Johnson Says Learn the Notes!

I'm committed to the proposition that, in order to make any kind of significant progress as a guitar player, it's imperative that you know the name of every single note on the guitar fretboard. I'm so convinced of it that I give away my 5-Lesson Foundational Series for free in almost every blog.

See? I'm doing it again!

In this article (Guitar World Magazine, August 3, 2026),

Eric Johnson says...

“Sometimes I do these classes, and one of the first things that I say is [that it's] really paramount to just sit down and to learn where, without thinking, you can look at any fret on your string and know what note it is."

Get that? Eric Johnson says it is "really paramount."

So how did Eric Johnson do it? Well, he explains how.

• “When I started playing guitar, I taught myself by sitting at the piano with the guitar in my hand and taking the notes and moving them over,” he remembers. “So what I had to do with this strange way of learning guitar was I had to learn all the notes on all the frets.”

That is indeed a “…strange way of learning the guitar…” It’s very idiosyncratic. I've never heard of anybody else doing it like that. You would already have to know the notes on the piano to employ this method. But in Eric Johnson's case it obviously got the job done!

Now in spite of Eric Johnson explaining how he learned every note on the fretboard, the article ignores that and goes on to include a link to a step-by-step deep dive into mastering the entire fretboard to “help” you. If you click on that link you will see this:

As if that isn’t overwhelming enough, there are even more things...

So now we have reading music conflated with knowledge of the fretboard - in the same article - before the student/reader has even demonstrated he knows the fretboard! Plus, the above graphic suggests there is a one-to-one relationship of each note on the fretboard to each note on the staff. This completely avoids the issue of register. It is very common in the real world (as opposed to the inbred guitar world) that you would actually play a melody an octave higher or lower than written. Which means, for instance, that if you're looking at an A on the staff - 2nd space from the bottom = 4th String/7th fret - but actually playing it an octave higher - 2nd string/10th fret, or 1st string/5th fret, or 3rd string/14th fret, or 4th string/19th fret. So not only do you have the nonlinearity of the guitar in play (multiple places to play the same note), you also have the issue of reading in one register and playing in another.

Knowledge of the fretboard and reading music are different things. There are plenty of players who know the fretboard forwards and backwards but can't read. It's fretboard knowledge that I emphasize. You can know the fretboard without reading, but you can't read without knowing the fretboard. I would suggest that if you know every note on the fretboard first, reading (which can be challenging) is a much smaller step.

So getting back to the Guitar World article on Eric Johnson. The author took a straightforward statement, "...it's really paramount to just sit down and to learn where, without thinking, you can look at any fret on your string and know what note it is" - and linked to an article with a massively overwhelming amount of data to "help" the reader with "...mastering the entire fretboard."

Notice he said, "...without thinking..." You KNOW. If you KNOW, you don't have to think; you don't have to figure it out.

In my career as a teacher I estimate I've given over 140,000 one-on-one lessons over the past 40 years. By far the most common problem I’ve seen, especially since the rise of the internet, is that people are exposed to too much information at once - like the "big picture" given above.

So instead of staring in confusion at the overwhelming amount of data given in "The Big Picture" and not knowing how to begin, how about this instead?

These six notes occur on the 6th and 5th strings at the first 3 frets that have dots - or whatever the fret markers are on your guitar; frets 3, 5 & 7.

Starting on the 6th-string, 7th fret, memorize and play the notes in this order:

B E A D G C

Notice the first four notes spell the word, "BEAD." So all you have to remember is, "BEAD-G-C."

Now add C and F to the above:

C F B E A D G C

I can teach you a way to get from these seven notes (eight notes if you count C twice) to every note on the guitar neck without memorizing all the note names on every string!

But don't worry about that now; at the present moment, just do this ONE single thing; memorize the names and locations of these, and only these, eight notes. How long is that going to take? 5 minutes? 2 minutes?

C-F-BEAD-G-C …one minute?

If, as my student, you can play these notes and recite the names as you play them, without looking at the above diagram, then, and only then, would I move on to the next lesson in the 5-Lesson Foundational Series.

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