First Position Guitar: A Small Primer

I put together a 19-page beginner guitar booklet — 36 reading exercises in twelve units, plus a chord-and-rhythm companion that runs alongside them. There’s now a second volume too: Volume 1 is a reading primer with a songbook attached, and Volume 2 is a songbook with a reading curriculum hidden inside it. Both are embedded below; nothing to download, just scroll.

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• Volume 1
• Volume 2

A few notes on Volume 1:

The key order Frets 0–4 across six strings give you exactly thirty note positions, and which of them are legal depends entirely on the key signature. C major gets the naturals. D major adds F♯ and C♯, which pushes you onto the fourth fret for the first time. A major adds G♯, and with it the last few positions. By the end of the third book you’ve physically touched every fret from 0 to 4 on every string.

Rhythm is frozen so pitch can have your full attention. Three symbols across all 36 exercises: quarter note, half note, half rest. 4/4 throughout. Rhythm simply isn’t available as a source of error while you’re learning to find strings. The chord companion then inverts this — the harmony moves slowly so rhythm can be the thing that changes.

Bm is the first barre chord, not F. F is traditional but it’s really hard. Bm is a lot easier.

And on Volume 2:

One axis moves per unit. Volume 1 could freeze rhythm down to three symbols because pitch was the only thing being taught. Volume 2 can’t freeze anything permanently, so the rule becomes: one thing is new, everything else is material you already own. G major costs nothing because every F♯ was drilled in book 2. E minor and A minor reuse the key signatures of G and C, and A minor’s leading tone G♯ sits on the exact three frets book 3 taught for A major. E major looks like the hardest key on paper — four sharps — and needs no new notes at all.

The payoff is book 9, where the position finally changes. Rhythm and key are both deliberately frozen there so fifth position can be the only variable, which is the same trick Volume 1 played with pitch, five books later.

Fifth position, not second. Second position is interpolation you can work out yourself. Fifth is where fret 5 on each string is the next open string up — the same rule you’d use to tune by ear — it’s a closed position so every shape is movable, and it’s where the flat keys stop being awkward. It also fixes a wall you hit in book 7: in F major, first position, the top string runs out at G, and there is nothing you can do about it inside frets 0–4. Better to hit that ceiling and then get the door opened than to be told about it.

The last piece is Bach’s Bourrée in E minor, and it’s the capstone for a structural reason rather than a sentimental one: its melody climbs above first position’s ceiling, so it is literally unplayable in the position the volume started in.

Nothing in it carries a text. Everything is abstract instrumental music or an original etude — dance movements, sonatina themes, the nineteenth-century guitar literature (Sor, Carulli, Carcassi, Giuliani, Aguado). At twelve to fifty bars, the guitar literature is better material anyway: idiomatic, progressive by design, textless, and public domain.

On the notation itself: the source is LilyPond, a free text-based engraver, which is why the notation is actually correct rather than approximately correct. Image generators will look nice, but end up littered with small mistakes. If you’re generating teaching material with AI, have it write LilyPond and compile it.