Notes For Sale
October 27th, 2005
E-mail TipOkay, so you pick up your guitar. What's on there that you've got to work with. Let's take a more-or-less standard 22-fret, six-string electric guitar. In this article, as well as elsewhere on this site, we're always assuming standard "E" tuning (E, A, D, G, B, E---low to high) unless otherwise indicated.
What we have on this guitar are 138 different notes or, more precisely, note locations (quite a few of these notes' pitches are repeated). What we actually have available to us are 47 different unique pitches. Thus this 22-fret guitar fretboard spans about 3 5/6 octaves or just under 4 octaves. A piano, by comparison, spans 7 1/4 octaves with its 88 keys. All of a piano's pitches are unique and not represented elsewhere on the keyboard.
Since we guitarists have repeated duplicate pitches, what are we going to do with them? Well, one of the main advantages of this quirk is that we can elicit a different tone or timbre from a certain pitch sequence by playing it on a different string or strings (take that, keyboardists). Also, the fingering of a certain passage might be made easier on a certain stringset.
In case you wanted to know...
10 notes (pitches) are unique and are found only once on the guitar fretboard.
9 notes (pitches) are found only twice on the fretboard.
10 are found repeated three times.
10 are found repeated four times.
8 are found repeated five times.
Of course, if you employ open or altered tunings these values will shift somewhat.
GuitarNote!So should you buy a 24-fret or 7-string guitar? As you can see, with the 24-fret guitar you're only going to gain two unique pitches way up the neck on the high E-string---a D# and an E. The 7-string guitar (assuming the 7th string is tuned to B and not a dropped-A tuning) will provide an additional gut-rumbling five extra lower notes, though, you could try to replicate this with a standard low E-string being down-tuned to B. Unless you use a heavy-guage string, though, it'll be flapping in the breeze.