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Guitar and bass fretboard: see every note, then learn it
Look up where any note, scale, chord or interval sits on a guitar or bass neck — tap a fret to hear it and see it on the staff and the piano. Then switch to Practise and find and name notes from memory, with every answer timed, until you no longer have to count.
Fretboard explorer & trainer
Fretboard explorer and recall practice
Every fret named, black keys as sharps. Fret 12 is the open string again, an octave higher.
Tap any fret to hear it and see the same note on the staff and the piano.
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Two halves: a reference, and practice
Explore is a reference. Choose Notes to see every fret named, the natural notes only, or every place one note lives; Scale, Chord or Intervals to light up a pattern from a root, labelled with note names or with degrees, chord tones or intervals. Tap any fret to hear it and see it on the staff and the piano, along with every other fret that plays exactly the same pitch.
Looking at a labelled diagram does not, by itself, teach you the neck. You can read that the eighth fret of the low E string is C a hundred times and still have to count up to it. What builds the knowledge is being asked — and answering — again and again: retrieval practice. That is what Practise is for. Find the note names a note and you tap any fret that plays it; Name the note marks a fret and you say which note it is. Twelve prompts, an answer shown straight after each one, and a summary of how many you knew first time and how long you took. Nothing is saved and there is no account.
Reading the diagram
On a wide screen the neck is drawn as tablature draws it: the nut on the left, higher frets to the right, and the highest string (string 1, the thin E) on top. If you would rather see it as you do looking down at your own guitar, switch Low string to on top. On a phone the neck stands upright like a chord diagram — nut at the top, low string on the left — so each string gets a fingertip-wide column. The dots are the inlays most instruments have at frets 3, 5, 7, 9 and 12 (two at the octave), and the numbers along the edge are fret numbers.
How the notes repeat
Each fret raises a string by one semitone, so the notes along a string are the chromatic scale. Twelve semitones make an octave, which is why the 12th fret plays the open string an octave higher — E2 becomes E3 on the low string — and why frets 12 to 24 repeat frets 0 to 12. Learn the first twelve frets and you know the whole neck.
Across the strings the same pitch turns up several times. Middle C (C4) is at string 2 (B), fret 1; string 3 (G), fret 5; string 4 (D), fret 10; string 5 (A), fret 15; string 6 (low E), fret 20. Counting octaves too, there are 6 Cs between the nut and the 12th fret. That is why notation, which says which pitch, leaves a guitarist to choose the string — and why the explorer lists the other places a tapped note can be played.
Why the B string breaks the patterns
Standard tuning, E A D G B E, puts each string a perfect fourth (5 semitones) above the one below it — except one pair: G to B is a major third, 4 semitones. So any shape that crosses from the G string to the B string moves one fret higher than the same shape elsewhere. The octave shape “two strings up, two frets up” becomes two strings up and three frets up once it crosses that pair. Turn on Intervals, pick a root on a low string, and you can see the pattern bend.
How to memorise the notes without counting
- Natural notes first, on strings 6 and 5. They give the root of most movable chord shapes. Between natural notes the gap is two frets, except E–F and B–C, which are one.
- Use landmarks. The 5th, 7th and 12th frets are easy to see. Know the notes there and everything else is one or two frets away.
- One note across every string. Choose Notes → One note to see all the places a note lives, then practise finding it on each string in turn.
- Practise recall in a small area. Start with frets 0–5 and the naturals, one or two strings. When you answer quickly and correctly, widen the area or add the sharps and flats. Speed matters: a note you have to work out is not yet a note you know.
Sharps and flats are the frets in between. The fret between F and G is F♯ or G♭ — the same fret with two names (see enharmonic notes). The explorer keeps one spelling on the board at a time, and in a scale or a chord it uses that scale’s own spelling: G♭ major contains C♭, never B.
Guitar, bass and drop D
A four-string bass is tuned like the lowest four strings of a guitar, an octave lower: its open E is E1, the guitar’s is E2. Every note shape you learn on those four guitar strings works on the bass. In drop D only string 6 changes, down a tone to D2, so every note on that string sits two frets higher than in standard tuning; the other five strings are unchanged.
The staff in the explorer shows the pitch that actually sounds. Guitar and bass music is written an octave higher than it sounds, so the low E string’s E2 is written as E3 in a guitar part.
Note names, or degrees and intervals?
Both. Note names tell you what you are playing; degrees and intervals tell you what it is doing — the third of the chord, the fifth of the scale. On a fretboard intervals are fixed distances, so a shape labelled 1 3 5 works from any root, while the note names change. Switch a scale or chord between note names and degrees to see the same frets both ways. These are the notes available, not a fingering: which of them make a playable chord shape is another question.
Prefer a keyboard? The virtual piano plays the same notes. To see one scale or chord in full on the staff, open the scale explorer or the chord explorer; to put a name to notes you are holding down, use the chord identifier. For what guitarists gain from theory, see music theory for guitar players.
Instruments covered: guitar (standard E A D G B E; drop d D A D G B E), bass (standard E A D G), up to the 24th fret.