Learning The Notes on The Fretboard (Made Simple)

Familiarizing yourself with notes on the guitar fretboard is not all that hard. You have to realize that there are only 12 notes on the guitar. No matter what fret you play it at, those notes will still be one of those 12 notes. Those fretboard notes would be…

A, A#, (A sharp), B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, and G#. Those are all the notes on the fretboard. So your job is to figure out where exactly all those notes are on the guitar.

Here’s a little trick I learned. Try taking one note and figuring out all the possible places you can play it on the fretboard, using all the strings. Start with something like E. Now for E, there are a total of 12 different places to play it; 2 on each string:

I’ll break it down for you right now.

Low E String:
1. Play it open
2. 12th fret

A String:
1. 7th fret
2. 19th fret

D String:
1. 2nd fret
2. 14th fret

G String:
1. 9th fret
2. 21st fret

B String:
1. 5th fret
2. 17th fret

High E String:
1. Play it open
2. 12th fret

And that is all the possible places you can play the note E on the guitar. (If you are using a standard guitar, with 6 strings and 21 frets)

This is just one of the 12 notes on the fretboard. Once you get them memorized fairly well, you can move on to another note. Just repeat this process until you’ve memorized all of them. A simple concept, yet it will take some work.
Once you get all these notes down, you can start too see where your root notes are, and that will help you when you are soloing and such.

So aim for memorizing one note a week, and you’ll know the notes on the fretboard in no time.