Fretboard Diagrams: How & Why to Use Them

Guitar players have developed some unique ways of communicating musical ideas beyond what we might consider standard music notation. In fact, it has certainly been my experience that most guitar players are far more familiar with reading TAB’s, chord charts and neck diagrams than traditional music scores. Some people might think this is because guitar players are generally lazy when it comes to reading music (a case could probably be made for this) but it could also be seen largely as a matter of ‘instrument anatomy’. 

Obviously, just by looking at the guitar we can see that fretted instruments are unique in the way that they are built around a ‘fretboard‘ as the way of communicating musical ideas. Where as the piano has the notes laid out in order of the musical alphabet on the keys right in front of you, the guitar neck could almost be seen as 6 individual short keyboards stacked on top of each other, just starting from different places at the open position. 

This is where the idea of ‘shapes’ becomes quite an important theme in learning how to play the guitar. As we learn, we begin engaging with all sorts of different shape combinations that notes make by the nature of the way they are stacked upon each other. We find that we are faced with the limitations of the shapes that our fingers are actually capable of making. We can also start beginning to see the way all of these different shapes overlap and interconnect with each other. This is precisely why fretboard diagrams are an essential visualisation tool for many guitar players in dealing with all of this geometric information. 

Using and creating fretboard diagrams can be helpful to us as guitar players regardless of whatever skill level we might be at. Obviously, you can use fretboard templates in any way that makes sense to you, but generally the 3 main ways we would usually make use of neck diagrams are as follows:

1) Memorising Shapes
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Using diagrams can be an extremely helpful way to memorise notes and new shapes such as chords, scales, intervals and arpeggios. If you are a teacher you will already know how helpful these types of diagrams can be as worksheets for students, whether it be for simply communicating and memorising new ideas visually or even just initially being able to breakdown how the musical alphabet is laid out across each of the separate strings.

2) Understanding Shapes

Secondly, using diagrams to breakdown the chords and scales we already know can be a very helpful way to really understand what it is that we are playing. Obviously, the end goal is to actually be musical with what we’re doing. Learning shapes isn’t an end within itself but it is simply a tool to help us in our creativity. Being able to understand the notes and intervals that make up our chords and scales (and how they interact with each other) is an important part of this process. Attempting to visualise this all at once is very difficult, especially when we are playing, but this task is much easier using visual aids like neck diagrams.

3) Creating Shapes

Lastly, using fretboard templates is a helpful way to record and write down new shapes and voicing’s as we are experimenting with new progressions and song ideas. Sometimes it may be hard to discern on playback the exact shapes and positions we were playing, particularly if we listen back to an idea weeks or even months later! Additionally, these types of diagrams also give us a quick and easy way to be able to translate our ideas to other guitar players in a way that is straight forward and universally makes sense.

So, if you’re not already utilising diagrams as a basic tool, there are a few points to consider. If you don’t have any templates to begin creating diagrams for yourself, (it just so happens) we have put together an entire FREE templates pack that is available for you. The pack consists of single full length standard fretboards (with or without notes) and various duplicates of this layout, as well as a bunch of ‘zoomed in’ fretboard breakdowns for you to create from. There’s really more templates here than you’d probably ever need, but this will certainly cater for people who like to visualise the fretboard in different ways.

Where can I get them? Simply sign up to our mailing list and upon confirmation you’ll be send a link to where you can download this pack for FREE! To use them, if you’re familiar with any basic graphics program it won’t be too difficult to build onto these basic templates digitally. Otherwise, without getting too advanced and technical, you can always print these out on real paper and actually use a pen or pencil (crazy concept, I know).

Finally, whether or not you’re using these specific templates is not really the main point here. You may have created your own that you like to use or you may even have software that does a similar thing. At the end of the day it is just about you having a way to be able to write down, reflect on and communicate the things you are learning, in a way that makes the most sense to you.

Note: To check out our updated Fretboard Templates Pack, CLICK HERE!

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