Bass Guitar Fretboard Notes Diagram
From “Tutorial¨ in The Bass Handbook
It will take you time and practice to discover the position of every note on your fretboard. I suggest learning it in stages. Start by becoming familiar with the open strings (You can play a blues progression, by the way, by just using the open strings: A, D, E.) Then try learning the natural notes from Diagram I […]. This omits the sharps and flats.
That is, a useful exercise is to learn by muscle memory all the naturals (refer to 20240831200842-Musical_Accidentals) on the fretboard after having memorized the open string notes from top to bottom and bottom to top on the bass guitar neck (Ashton 2005, 127):
Exercise 1 from “Tutorial¨ by The Bass Handbook
An accompanying exercise to alternate with potentially is moving up and down an octave across the fretboard, e.g. transposing A to another octave and back (Ibid):
Exercise 2 from “Tutorial¨ in The Bass Handbook
The aforementioned diagram for naturals on the bass guitar is as follows (Ashton 2005, 126):
Diagram I from “Tutorial¨ in The Bass Handbook
More inclusive diagram for 5-string bass guitar
By contrast to this diagram, an all-inclusive diagram, that includes the additional string of the 5-string bass guitar as well as all the accidentals, would be the following:
My bass guitar model hitherto
My bass guitar, hitherto a Yamaha black rosewood 5-string electric TRBX305, has, well, 5 strings. The extra string is a lower note, B.
Finally, once you have had your fill with that, you can move on to including the occasional accidental in your practice, based on the following diagrams (Ashton 2005, 128):
Diagram II-III from “Tutorial¨ in The Bass Handbook
chord_progression diatonic_chord_progression open_string #♭ #♯ bass_guitar 5-string_bass_guitar accidentals composite_chordophone_neck plucked_string_instrument_neck strummed_string_instrument_neck musicology
bibliography
- Morrish, John, ed. “Tutorial.” In The Bass Handbook: A Complete Guide for Mastering the Bass Guitar, 1st ed., 121–238. San Francisco, CA: BackBeat, 2005.