Learn the Notes in First Position (Frets 0–5)

So far you've played by coordinates: string 5, fret 3. This lesson gives those coordinates names. First position (the open strings plus the first five frets) holds every natural note you need, and learning them here pays off across the entire neck. The whole job comes down to two short walking exercises and one rule about the musical alphabet.

Seven letters, two odd gaps

Music uses seven letters, A through G, then wraps back around to A. On the fretboard, moving between letters is usually a whole step: two frets. But the alphabet has two built-in exceptions, and they're worth memorizing before anything else: B to C and E to F are half steps, just one fret apart. Every other neighboring pair is two frets. Piano players see this as the two spots with no black key in between; guitarists just have to know it. With that one rule and the name of each open string, you can work out any natural note on the neck from scratch.

Your anchors: the open strings

From thickest to thinnest, the open strings are E, A, D, G, B, E. The old campfire mnemonic is Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good-Bye Eddie, which is silly enough to stick. (Make up a better one if you like; the sillier and more yours it is, the faster it sticks.) Each open string is fret zero, the starting anchor for the walks below. Every note you meet is an open-string name plus some whole and half steps.

Walk the low strings

Start on the three thick strings. On the low E string, the walk is E-F-G: open, fret 1 (that E-to-F half step in the wild), fret 3. On the A string it's A-B-C: open, fret 2, fret 3, and there's B-to-C, the other half step. On the D string, D-E-F: open, fret 2, fret 3.

As you pick each note, say its name out loud. Not in your head. Out loud. It feels ridiculous, and it works better than anything else in this lesson: your voice forces the name to surface before the finger moves, which is exactly the recall you're training. Give the two low strings most of your attention, too. Power chords (coming in lesson 7) and barre chords are movable shapes that take their name from whatever note sits under your index finger on the E or A string, so knowing these two strings lets you find any chord on the neck.

Walk the high strings

Same game on the thin strings. G string: G-A-B at frets 0, 2, and 4. B string: B-C-D at frets 0, 1, and 3, with the B-to-C half step again. High E string: E-F-G at frets 0, 1, and 3, the exact same letters as the low E walk, two octaves up.

The octave shortcut

One shape projects low-string knowledge upward: from any note on the two lowest strings, go two frets up and two strings over and you land on the same note an octave higher. G at fret 3 on the low E string reappears at fret 5 on the D string; C at fret 3 on the A string reappears at fret 5 on the G string. Learn the bottom two strings well and this one shape hands you the middle of the neck almost for free. It also leads straight into scale playing: the beginner scales guide turns these note names into shapes you can improvise with, and the chord, scale, and mode library lets you look up any of them on an interactive fretboard.

How to practice this

One string per day, two minutes, names out loud. That's the whole assignment. After the walks feel easy, flip the drill into a game: pick a letter, then find and name it on all six strings before the kettle boils. Slow recall is fine; fast-but-wrong is the thing to avoid. By the end of the week the low E and A strings should answer instantly, and that's all the theory you need for what comes next: your first open chords, Em, G, C, and D.