Lesson 39 / 41 9 min
Guitar notation: fingering, voices and chords
Finger numbers, p-i-m-a, string numbers, positions and barres, two voices, chord symbols, slash notation, strums and tunings.
Guitar music adds its own layer of symbols on top of standard notation: which finger and which string to use, how to strum, how chords are written, and how the guitar should be tuned. This lesson covers all of them.
Left-hand fingers
Small numbers next to the notehead tell you which fretting-hand finger to use:
| Number | Finger |
|---|---|
| 0 | Open string |
| 1 | Index |
| 2 | Middle |
| 3 | Ring |
| 4 | Pinky |
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A short line before a finger number (–2) means guide finger: slide the same finger along the string to the next note, without lifting it.
Right-hand fingers
Classical and fingerstyle music names the picking-hand fingers with letters from Spanish:
| Letter | Finger |
|---|---|
| p (pulgar) | Thumb |
| i (índice) | Index |
| m (medio) | Middle |
| a (anular) | Ring |
| c or e | Little finger (rarely used) |
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String numbers
A number inside a circle — ① to ⑥ — says which string to play a note on. ① is the high e, ⑥ the low E. It removes all doubt about position when a note could be played in several places:
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Positions and barres
- A Roman numeral (V, VII, IX) gives the position: the fret where your index finger sits.
- C or B plus a Roman numeral — CV or BV — means barre across all strings at that fret (C from Spanish cejilla, B for barre). ½CV or CII with a fraction means a partial barre over some strings.
- A dashed line after the sign shows how long to hold the barre.
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Two voices on one staff
Fingerstyle and classical guitar often play a melody and a bass line at once. They're written as two voices on the same staff: the upper voice with stems up, the lower voice with stems down. Read each voice's rhythm separately — they line up vertically where they sound together.
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Rests are moved up or down to show which voice they belong to.
Chord symbols and chord diagrams
Chord names written above the staff tell you the harmony. Lead sheets and songbooks often show chord diagrams there too, or in a chart at the top of the song. You've already learned to read the diagrams in lesson 5:
N.C. means "no chord": the band stops or the melody plays alone.
Slash notation and rhythm charts
In rhythm parts and band charts, the guitar part is often just slashes with chord names above: "play this chord, in your own style, for this many beats". One slash per beat:
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When the exact rhythm matters, the slashes get stems, flags and beams — rhythmic notation. Read it like normal rhythm, strumming the chord shown:
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Strumming and picking directions
- ⊓ (a square bracket) — downstroke.
- V — upstroke.
- An arrow beside a chord shows the strum direction. Publishers don't all draw it the same way, so check the legend at the start of the book; ⊓ and V are never ambiguous.
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Rolled chords
A wavy vertical line before a chord means arpeggiate (roll) it: play the notes one after another very quickly, from the lowest to the highest, and let them ring together. An arrowhead on the line shows the direction.
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Capo and tuning
At the top of a guitar score you may find:
- Capo 3 (or Capo III) — put the capo at the 3rd fret. Notation is usually written as if the capo were the nut (fret numbers in the tab count from the capo).
- Tuning notes — for example ⑥ = D means "tune the 6th string down to D" (Drop D). Some scores print the whole tuning, like D A D G B E.
- Scordatura — the classical name for any non-standard tuning.
In Drop D, the open 6th string is D, so the notation shows a low D below the usual low E:
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Use the fingering
Fingerings in a good score aren't decoration — they're the editor's solution to the hard spots. Follow them at first; once a passage is comfortable you can try your own.