Today's guitar question

My milestone today was to work - for the first time - all the way through the first lead guitar solo in my tutorial book, on my electric guitar.

So once that's internalised and I have some practice playing against the backing track you may expect a video, although sadly without the performative grimaces of pure ecstacy.

And now to this.

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Today's guitar question

The note F seems unusually awkward on the guitar if you want to stay close to the nut and make maximum use of open strings. You can find F easily enough on the first fret of both E strings, but on several of the other strings it is much further up the fretboard. Does this make F — and particularly an F chord — unusually difficult to accommodate in open-position playing, or is there another note which presents the same problem?

That was my question to GPT-5.6.

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There is a real phenomenon here, although the problem is not quite that the note F itself is especially remote on the guitar. There is, for example, a perfectly accessible F on the fourth string at the third fret, as well as the two Fs on the first fret of the E strings.

What makes F major awkward near the nut is something more structural: there is no open F string.

The guitar's open strings are E–A–D–G–B–E. That tuning makes several common chords wonderfully economical. E major can use both open E strings; A major has the open A; D major has the open D; and G and C can exploit several useful open chord tones.

But F major consists of F–A–C. Of the six open strings, only A belongs to the chord:

E — no
A — yes
D — no
G — no
B — no
E — no

So five of the six open strings are unusable in a straightforward F major chord. That is why the familiar first-position F wants you to fret so much of the instrument:

1–3–3–2–1–1

and why beginners so quickly encounter the notorious first-fret F barre chord.

There are easier partial versions. The shape xx3211, for example, gives C–F–A–C and is a perfectly good F major chord, despite having C rather than F as its lowest note.

So the original intuition is substantially right: F major is unusually hostile to open-string playing.

It isn't completely unique, though. B major is arguably even worse as an open-position chord. B major is B–D♯–F♯. Although there is an open B string, neither D♯ nor F♯ is available as an open string, so the standard B major becomes another barre-type shape, usually x24442: 'A' moved up two frets.

There is an interesting underlying reason for all this. Standard guitar tuning was not designed to make every key equally convenient. It strongly privileges certain keys — particularly E, A, D, G and C — because their chords and scales can exploit the open strings. F sits just outside this particularly guitar-friendly territory.

This is also one reason guitarists use capos so much. Put a capo at the first fret and play an E shape, and you have F major while retaining the wonderfully resonant geometry of an open E chord.

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