Note hunt Pick a fret range, a string or the whole neck, and turn memorizing into a short challenge. Open the challenge
Chords in the spotlight Light up the notes of a chord, spot its degrees and check what your fingers are really playing. Show the chord
Improvising map Color the notes that work, compare the modes and find the lines that sound good. Pick a scale
Your fretboard workshop Save, export, import or share a setup you can come back to. Manage my projects
This is an interactive guitar fretboard. Every note is on it, from the nut to the twelfth fret, and tapping a fret plays it. You can show the names or hide them, read them as sharps or as flats, change the tuning, light up a chord or a scale across the whole neck, and run a short quiz on any of it. Free, in your browser, no account. It sits alongside the rest of our free guitar tools.
If you have never used one before, five moves cover almost everything. Pick your tuning. Leave the names on and tap a few frets to hear them. Open Chords or Scales and choose a root, to see where those notes actually live. Switch Display to Hide names when you want to test yourself instead of reading. Then turn a quiz on and answer on the board.
The notes on the fretboard
The neck looks like a lot to learn and it is not. There are twelve notes, they go in one order, and that order never changes. What follows is the whole map.
The open strings
From the thickest string to the thinnest: E, A, D, G, B, E. The low E is string 6 and the high E is string 1, which is the numbering this tool uses. The two E strings are two octaves apart, so the pattern you learn on one of them is already true on the other.
One fret, one half step
Move up one fret and the note goes up one half step. Twelve half steps make an octave, which is why the 12th fret of any string is that open string again, one octave higher. Past the 12th fret nothing new happens: the whole map starts over.
The two places with no sharp
Between E and F, and between B and C. Those two pairs are one fret apart. Every other pair of natural notes is two frets apart, with a sharp or a flat sitting in between. Learn those two tight spots and half of the confusion goes away.
The dots are landmarks
The marks at frets 3, 5, 7, 9 and 12 are there so your hand knows where it is without counting. Use them as anchors: learn the note at each dot on a string, and the frets around it come almost for free.
Moving the same note to another string
A note you know on one string turns up again five frets lower on the next thinner string. The E at the twelfth fret of string 6 is the same E at the seventh fret of string 5. The one exception is between strings 3 and 2, where it is four frets instead, because those two are the only pair not tuned a fourth apart. That single exception is worth memorizing on its own: it explains most of the mistakes people make when they move a shape across the neck.
The order to learn them in
Start with E, F, B and C everywhere on the board. They are the four notes caught in the two tight spots, they show up often, and they give you dense landmarks. Then add G, A and D. Finish with the sharps and flats, which are not really extra work: each one is simply the fret between two notes you already know, named up from the lower one or down from the higher one.
Every note on the fretboard, as a table
The board above is the better way to learn this, because you can hear it. But a table is the better way to check one thing quickly, and it is the one you can print or read on a phone with the guitar in your hands. Six rows, one per string, from the open string to the twelfth fret.
| String | Open | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6, low E | E | F | F#/Gb | G | G#/Ab | A | A#/Bb | B | C | C#/Db | D | D#/Eb | E |
| 5, A | A | A#/Bb | B | C | C#/Db | D | D#/Eb | E | F | F#/Gb | G | G#/Ab | A |
| 4, D | D | D#/Eb | E | F | F#/Gb | G | G#/Ab | A | A#/Bb | B | C | C#/Db | D |
| 3, G | G | G#/Ab | A | A#/Bb | B | C | C#/Db | D | D#/Eb | E | F | F#/Gb | G |
| 2, B | B | C | C#/Db | D | D#/Eb | E | F | F#/Gb | G | G#/Ab | A | A#/Bb | B |
| 1, high E | E | F | F#/Gb | G | G#/Ab | A | A#/Bb | B | C | C#/Db | D | D#/Eb | E |
Two names in a cell are two names for one fret. A#/Bb is a single note that a song in one key writes as A sharp and a song in another writes as B flat, and your finger goes to the same place either way. Which spelling is correct depends on the key, not on the guitar.
Read the table down a column instead of along a row and you see the other half of the picture. At the fifth fret, from the thickest string to the thinnest, it reads A D G C E A: your open tuning of E A D G B E, moved up five frets, every string by the same amount. That is exactly what a capo does, and exactly what the first finger of a barre chord does, which is why barre chords are movable at all. The power chords guide works off the first two rows alone, because a power chord takes its name from the note under your first finger on string 6 or string 5.
The table stops at the twelfth fret because there is nothing after it. Fret 13 repeats fret 1 an octave higher, and so on to the end of the neck. Put a capo across a fret and the table shifts the same way: our guitar capo chart says which chord each open shape then sounds as.
Scales and chords on the neck
Once the names are in place, the point of a fretboard diagram changes. You stop asking what a fret is called and start asking where a chord or a scale lives. That is what the Chords and Scales panels are for.
Chords across the whole neck
Pick a root, pick a quality, and every note of that chord lights up on all six strings. The qualities are major, minor, sus2, sus4, add6, add9, add11, 6/9, maj7, 7, m7, m7b5, dim7 and the power chord. What you see is not a fingering, it is the raw material: all the places that chord exists. The groups of neighboring roots are the skeletons of the shapes you already play, which is the quickest way to understand why the same chord has several forms up the neck. Those five movable shapes are what players call the CAGED system, and seeing them lit up on the board is a faster explanation than any diagram of it: a chord drawn across twelve frets is the same five shapes, over and over. If you want one of them drawn on its own, with the finger numbers, our guitar chord finder does that, and the printable guitar chord chart holds the common positions.
Scales and modes
The Scales panel carries the seven modes of the major scale, from Ionian to Locrian, the major pentatonic and the minor pentatonic, the modes of melodic minor and of harmonic minor, harmonic major, the whole tone scale, both diminished scales and the augmented scale. Choose one and it is drawn on the neck from the root you picked.
Mono or Functions
The Colors switch is the part most people miss. Mono draws every note of the scale in one color, which is what you want when you are learning a shape. Functions gives each degree its own color, so the root, the third and the fifth stop being anonymous dots. It is the difference between playing a position and knowing what you are playing.
Reading intervals
There is no separate interval mode here, and the page will not pretend there is. Use Functions instead and count from the root: the third is the third note of the scale, the fifth is the fifth. On one string, a major third is four frets up and a fifth is seven frets up. Those distances are the same everywhere on the neck, which is the whole reason guitar shapes move.
Tuning, sharps or flats, sound
Five tunings are built in: standard, half step down, Open G, Open D and a tuning in fourths. The whole board rewrites itself when you change one, so an alternate tuning stops being guesswork. The Notation switch reads the same frets as sharps or as flats, which is the easiest way to see why one fret can have two names. And with Sound on, each fret plays, with a short, natural or long sustain. If you are not sure the guitar in your hands matches what you hear, our online guitar tuner fixes that first.
Saving and exporting
Any setup can be saved as a project, reloaded later, or copied as a link you can keep or send. Exports come as PNG, SVG or JSON, in color or in black and white when you mean to print it and write on it by hand.
Memorize the fretboard: quiz modes
Looking at a diagram does not make you recall it. Being asked does. The tool asks in three places, and each one has its own settings.
The note quiz
Open Notes, set Note quiz to On, and the tool names a note. You find it on the board. Switch Display to Hide names first, or you are simply reading the answer. Six modes, from one note anywhere to every octave of the same note:
| Mode | What it asks |
|---|---|
| Simple | One note, anywhere on the board. The place to start. |
| Medium A | One note inside the fret range you set, for example 1 to 5. |
| Medium B | One note on the single string you picked. |
| Medium C | One note anywhere, but never twice in a row on the same string. |
| Advanced | A fret range and a string at the same time. |
| Advanced 2 | Every position of the same note, so you find all its octaves. |
The chord quiz
Open Chords and pick a question type. Random full chords gives you a different chord each time. The chord shown keeps the one in the menu. Random degree asks for a single chord tone, root only asks for the roots, and triad asks for the root, the third and the fifth. Degree questions are where the Functions colors pay off.
The scale quiz
Open Scales and choose a source: a random scale from the families, the scale shown in the menu, the pentatonics, the diatonic scale, the major scale and its modes, harmonic minor and its modes, melodic minor and its modes, or the symmetric scales. Then a type, full scale, random degree or root. Some settings add five difficulty steps, which widen the answer from one vertical box inside a fret range to a diagonal running across the whole neck.
Timer, score and the series of ten
Each question has a clock, set to ten, eight, seven or six seconds. The counters keep right and wrong answers apart. The series of ten closes with a score out of ten, which is what makes a two-minute session something you can compare to yesterday.
A 10-minute routine
Here is a session that fits in the time most people actually have. Keep the guitar in your hands throughout: the point is to connect what you see on screen with what your fingers do.
1. Tune up, 1 to 2 minutes
Get the six strings right before anything else. A fretboard diagram is useless against an out of tune guitar, because the note you hear stops matching the note you read. Our online guitar tuner does it through your microphone.
2. Note quiz, 3 to 4 minutes
Hide the names, set the fret range to 1 to 5, and run a series of ten. Then move the range to 5 to 9 and run another. Play each answer on your own guitar as you tap it, so the name, the place and the sound arrive together.
3. One chord, all over, 3 minutes
Open Chords, pick a chord you already play, and turn Functions on. Find its root, its third and its fifth in two or three places up the neck, then play each of them. This is where shapes you learned by hand start making sense.
4. One scale, slowly, 2 minutes
Choose a scale, keep Functions on, and play it up and down once, saying the degree out loud rather than the note name. Slow and even beats fast and ragged. Stop while it still feels easy.
Done four or five times a week, that is the fastest honest route to a neck you can see without looking. Do not add minutes, add days.
One variation worth adding once the names are reliable. Take a recording, run it through what chord is this to get the chord names, then find each of those chords on the board here and play it. That closes the loop: a sound, a name, a place on the neck.
Frequently asked questions
How do I memorize the notes on the guitar fretboard?
Why does the 12th fret repeat the open strings?
Where are the two places with no sharp?
Can I see intervals on the neck?
Is it free, and does it work on a phone?
Who made this
Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play.
His teaching runs on a scale of eight levels, L1 to L8. The point of a scale is honesty: it lets a song be called easy only when it really is easy for the player in front of you. That is the same reason this fretboard colors the degrees instead of only naming the notes, and why it tells you plainly that it has no interval mode.
The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way: in the browser, no account, built because a student needed it. More about who writes these pages and how they are checked is on our about page.