In standard musical notation you have got five lines and you've got four spaces as opposed to six lines in tablature.
Each one of these lines and spaces are assigned a note name.
In the musical alphabet we refer to the notes as A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Then it starts over again.
You have also got what are called accidentals which means you are taking for example an A and you are raising it or lowering it.
An incremental amount that is not represented by jumping for example an A to B.
When you add an accidental you see a little sharp sign which looks like a number sign
or you see something that looks like a B which is called a flat.
If you are raising the note a little bit it is a sharp.
If you are lowering the note a little bit it is a flat.
We will get into more precise definitions of that a little bit later.
If you look at the supplemental materials here and follow along you will notice that I've got little examples of musical notation.
I've outlined the names of the notes that happen on the lines of the staff.
Those notes are E, G, B, D and F.
The spaces are F, A, C and E.
If you look down below those note names and those little black dots that correspond with the note names
you see the tablature that is represented as those notes.
My E in this particular case is going to be second fret on my D string.
That is going to be the E that resides on the first line of the standard musical notation.
My G is going to be my open G.
That is going to be the second line of the musical notation.
My B is going to be my open B.
My D is going to be third fret on my B string.
My F is going to be first fret on my E string.
Playing those notes is really not musical at all but as you get familiar with these notes and reading the tablature
it is going to be a way for you to check to make sure that you are playing the right notes.
The spaces. The notes in between the lines are F, A, C and E.
Those correspond to the guitar like this.
Third fret D string is going to be the first space on the staff.
Second fret G string is going to be the A so the second space.
C is going to be the first fret on your B string.
E is going to be your open E.
A handy way to remember the order of lines and the order of spaces
because in standard musical notation they don't write the name of the note above the note you have to know it.
A handy acronym to remember the lines is…
Every good boy deserves fudge or every good boy deserves fun or fireworks.
Every good boy deserves fireworks is my favorite one.
For spaces it is pretty easy to remember because the spaces just spell face.
Now because so many of the notes on the guitar are played outside of those five lines and four spaces you have to be able
to count above the staff and below the staff to find many of the notes.
If my top line is going to be F, that is nowhere near the highest note of the guitar.
There are a couple ways that things are notated in order to cover that.
The first is if you see right before a phrase or a measure in the staff or in the notation if you see a little eight v a with some
little dots after it that is going to communicate that you are playing things up twelve frets or down twelve frets.
Usually you are communicating that you are playing it up.
Twelve frets on the guitar is referred to as an octave.
The other way that we do it is that we just simply add lines to the top of the staff and
create notes that go well below and well above the standard five lines.
That is probably the most frequent thing that you are going to see in most standard musical notation.