Learn Every Note On Your Fretboard In Minutes

Forget memorizing the entire fretboard at once. We start where it counts most: the sixth string, the low E. You’ll learn a practical map that turns guesswork into certainty by pairing the chromatic scale with the guitar’s visual cues. We break down the “BE” shortcut so half steps make sense, show how to lock F, G, A, B, C, D to odd-numbered frets, and explain why that single sequence instantly improves your chords, scales, and riff targeting.

We walk through a clean framework: open E, then 1, 3, 5 for F, G, A; add 7 for B; place C at 8 and D at 10 around the ninth-dot trap; and finish at the 12th-fret octave to mirror everything you’ve learned. With that core in place, sharps and flats stop being speed bumps. Need G sharp? Move one up from G. Need E flat? Move one up from D or one down from E. Enharmonics become a tool, not a tangle.

The best part is how quickly this sticks. Use quick-fire prompts without even holding a guitar: what note is at 5, where’s C, what lives at 10, what’s A sharp near? You’ll build recall that survives stage lights and practice fatigue. Once the sixth string feels automatic, you’ll be ready to map the fifth string with the same method, shifting only where those half steps land.

If this helped you see the fretboard in a new way, follow the show, share it with a guitarist who’s stuck on note names, and leave a review telling us which drill clicked for you most. Your feedback guides future lessons and keeps these shortcuts coming.

Links:

Check out the GuitarZoom Academy:
https://academy.guitarzoom.com/

• Steve’s Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/stinemus...
• GuitarZoom Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/guitarz0...
• Songs Channel → https://www.youtube.com/user/GuitarSo... .

Chapters

• 0:00 Why The Sixth String Matters
• 1:28 The 12 Notes And The Word “BE”
• 4:20 Mapping E String: 1–3–5 As F G A
• 7:05 Adding B, Then C And D Around 9
• 9:14 Octaves At 12 And Rapid Recall
• 10:25 Sharps, Flats, And Naming Confidence
• 11:15 Practice Plan And Fifth String Preview

Transcript

Steve: 0:35

All right, so in this video, what I want to do is just show you a shortcut to learning the notes on each string of your guitar. We're going to start with the sixth string, which arguably would be probably the most important one because you build your scales and your bar chords and all that sort of thing off of there. And so there's a couple things I want to say about that. Number one is don't be in a big hurry to get to all of the strings until you've really, really learned, you know, absorbed the topic or the concept on the sixth string to where you can do it back to front. There's nothing to think about. You just play it and you know where the notes are. And it doesn't take long, especially with what I'm going to talk about here. When you get there, then you could move to the fifth string and do the same thing on the fifth string in its own way. And then what I like to tell people is the best thing you could do at that point is start cross-referencing the notes on the sixth string to the fifth string. Not just learning the fourth string and the third string and so on, but get again, get really comfortable with where things are. Not that you have to find them, but you know where they are. So in order to learn the notes on the guitar, the first thing you have to understand, real quick, is what we call the chromatic scale. Now, the chromatic scale is simply all the notes available to us in music. And I'm going to give you a bit of a shortcut to that too. There's really only 12 notes in music. Okay. You might see a piano with 88 keys. There's not 88 different notes. There's only 12 notes. And so the shortcut is think about it this way, almost like a circle. Think about A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C. When we go around over and over and over, we're going up or down what we call an octave. So if you found A on the piano and you went to the next A, you're going up an octave, and then it's the same notes. If you went down on the piano and found the next A, you're going down an octave. So A, B, C, D, E, F, G, there's no H or Q or something like that. It's just A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. Now, those would be the white keys on the piano. Now, the black keys on the piano would be what we call the accidentals, the sharps or the flats. Now let's just talk in terms of sharps to begin with so we can understand what this is. So if you thought about it, if every white key, uh what we'll call a prime note, A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, if every one of those notes got a black key, an A sharp, C sharp, D sharp, so on like that, we'd wind up with 14 notes because we have seven A, B, C, D, E, F, G, right? And if all of them got sharps, we'd wind up with 14 notes. Well, we don't have 14, we only have 12. And the reason is if you think about what a piano looks like, you've probably noticed that there's a couple of spots on the piano where there's no black key in between the white keys. Okay? So the shortcut here is that those notes that that don't get sharps are B and E, which spells the word B. Okay? So all you really have to think about is you have the notes A, A sharp, B, C, C sharp, D, D sharp, E, F, F sharp, G, G sharp, and then it starts all over on A again. Shortcut, A through G, everybody gets sharps except for B and E, which spells the word B. So now if we go to the guitar and we want to learn where those notes are, we're going to use the dots on the guitar or the odd numbered frets. Some people don't have dots, some people don't have a dot at the first fret. It's okay. We're going to be using the odd numbered frets. And if you do have dots, it certainly helps from a visual perspective. But it's not necessary. So if we took the six string, for instance, and I plucked the sixth string, the note I'm hearing is E. If I'm tuned in a standard way, in a regular old way, this note would be E. Okay. So the first thing I have to do, of course, is memorize that the sixth string is E when I pluck it. Now let's keep going. So if I go to the first fret, which is an odd number, some of you would have uh dots, some of you would not. That's an F. Okay. So E, F, 0, 1. Now what we want to do is we want to start working with the odd numbers or the dots on the fretboard. So we've got 1, 3, 5. Let's just start with 1, 3, and 5. So this note is F. And it is. This note would be F sharp, but we don't care about that right now. This is G. This would be G sharp, but we don't care about that right now. This is A. So we have F G A. F G A. 135 F G A. And what you want to do is you want to tell yourself 1, 3, 5, and F G A. You want to make the relationship between the fret number and the name of the note that exists there. One is F, three is G, five is A. You might have somebody quiz you on it. Now, that doesn't seem like a lot of information, but if you think about it, we're almost halfway through the entire fretboard. So even if you just learned one, three, five, FGA today and then learn the rest tomorrow and the next day or whatever, it would take you no time at all to learn this. So F is one, G is three, five is A. That's what it is. F G A, one, three, five. Okay. Learn it back back and forth. One, three, five, F G A, make that relationship. Now, once you absolutely know that F is on one and G is on three and five is A here, then in between those you would know F, F sharp. G, G sharp. So if you know where G is and somebody wants G sharp, you just move up one. If you know where F is, you absolutely know where F is. And you want F sharp, you just move up one. Now, what are flats? Well, flats are opposite sharps. So if you have F sharp, it's the same as G flat. F sharp and G flat are the same note. They just have two different names. We call it an N harmonic, which really means it's just the same note with two different names, F sharp and G flat. So as guitar players, as musicians, sometimes people will call it F sharp, sometimes people will call it G flat. For us, we know what it is. We know where it is. We can work with that. So F G A. That's why you start with the prime notes and then the secondary notes, sharps or flats, we can find by proxy because we know where the prime notes are. So F G A 135. Start with that. Now let's say you get really good with that and we want to add on one more. So we add on the next odd number, F G A B. So this dot, seventh fret odd number is B. F G A B, 1357, F G A B. And again, have somebody maybe in your family quiz you on that. You know, they might say, you might just tell them, ask me these questions. Where's F, where's G, where's A, where's B? And then you're just gonna say one, seven, five, three, one, five, three, seven, whatever, as they ask you that. And then you can tell them, ask me what is at one, three, five, and seven. And again, they can go in any order they want, and you're gonna think about that. So you don't need your guitar to do that. You need your you to think about that. You need to visualize that and make that connection in your head. So F G A B, F G A B, 1, 3, 5, 7. Piece of cake. Now we move on to the next one. So the next dot, the X odd, the next odd number is 9. Now we do have a problem here because B is at 7. We know B doesn't get a sharp, so C is at 8 and D is at 10. So C and D surround this odd number. It's not on the odd number, it surrounds the odd number. So F G A B C and D. F G A B C and D. 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10. Obviously the dots were not put on the guitar for the six string for everything to be perfect. We have five other strings we have to deal with here, right? So one, three, five, seven, eight, and ten. We're accommodating by thinking about where are the prime numbers. And that's pretty easy. 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10. 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10, right? 9 would technically be C sharp, but let's learn 8 and 10 around it. C and D. 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10. F G A B, C and D. And then when you get to the 12th fret with the two dots, it just starts all over. You started on E, now you're on E. So one is the same as 13. 3 is the same as 15, and the dots are going to line up. This is A, so is this. This is B, so is this. That's what's happening on the rest of the guitar. So it's just an octave of the first part of the guitar. So my suggestion to you is don't worry about the fifth string. What I like to tell people is if you sort of know something, the problem is you sort of don't know something. So the best thing that you can do is burn these thoughts, burn this fret uh the sixth string into your brain. F, G, A, B, C, D, know where those things are so you can find them very quickly. One, three, five, seven, eight, and ten. So if somebody asks for A, you know where it is. If they want C, you know where it is. If they want F, you know where it is. If they want C sharp, you know where it is. If they want D sharp or E flat, again, you can get used to the sharp and flat terminology because sharps and flats are they're the same, right? So F sharp, G flat. You can fight it wherever you want to go. So start there. And then when you go to the fifth string, you're gonna do the exact same thing, but it's gonna look a little different. Because the fifth string, of course, is starting with A. So where the half steps are, you know, the B, the C, the E, F stuff, it's gonna change a little bit. But let's not worry about that right now. Let's just start with the sixth string and work from there, okay? Now, I don't have an end screen for this or an end call to action, uh, Lulu, because I'm actually making this for a student. So um you're gonna have to just add something onto this thing.