For slide players, gold bars on the frets show where consonant (sweet) note pairs appear at the same fret and blue bars show where neutral or weakly dissonant pairs appear.  These note pairs can, and often are, played to introduce tension.  Red bars on the frets show strongly dissonant (sour) pairs.  Note that this color coding only applies to adjacent fingerings.

The diatonic major scale can be considered the foundation of western music and it is helpful to learn other scales by how they differ from the major scale, rather than as abstract concepts.  So, the Roman numerals in the fingering marks indicate the degree of and modifications from the major scale.  Capitalized numbers indicate that the note is unmodified from the major scale.  Lower-case numbers indicate that the note is flatted ("minor," "diminished," etc.).  A plus mark after capitalized numbers indicates that the note is sharped.

When printing hardcopies, configure your browser to "print background images and colors" (Tools|Internet Options|Advanced on MSIE) and use File|Page Setup (MSIE) to select landscape mode and reduce left and right margins.  If you don't print background images the fretboard and strings will not show up.  If you don't set the page to landscape mode and reduce the margins the fretboard will probably not fit on one page.

These diagrams are legible on a black and white laser printer but are better printed in color.  In particular, the color coding of the "slide bars" may not show up well when printed in black and white.

Don't forget to turn off printing of background colors and images when you leave this page or you may be unpleasantly surprised when you print some other web page that has a dark background!