If you understand the layout of a piano (or the order of the notes on the chromatic scale), you also know the layout of a guitar

If you, like me, are coming from experience in other instruments and working on understanding guitar, I made this post for you.

Having already learned piano, trumpet and drums, I opted to learn guitar on my own, at my own pace. I’ve been at it for a few years now, and by now have learned my way around the fretboard as a raw tool. You’re never done learning, but along the way I’ve figured out some things that would’ve given me a massive head start when I first jumped in, so I thought I’d share.

I probably should’ve sought out a teacher who also knew other instruments, and might help me leverage my existing musical knowledge.

But I didn’t. I chose to discover these things the hard way – so here you go!

1 Each string is like a flattened section of a piano

Each fret is a half step. So if you know your way around a piano, you know your way around a guitar fretboard.

That’s what two octaves on a piano looks like. Now imagine each string on a guitar as a keyboard where the black keys are as tall as the white ones:

That’s awfully fretboardish, no?

If your guitar has 24 frets, that’s every note on your top string (the lowest one) when the guitar is in E Standard (also commonly known simply as ‘standard’). A guitar is like a stack of six keyboards, but the first proverbial piano key on each ‘keyboad’ is whatever that string is tuned to.

The length of your imaginary stack of keyboards (aka the number of notes) depends on how many frets your guitar has. It’ll typically be at least one entire octave on each string, with another chunk of the next octave. Google says your guitar will have somewhere between 15 and 24 frets.

Unless you have an unusually short guitar, you’ll probably see double dots on the 12th fret (I’ve seen some guitars with two dots on the 7th fret, too). That’s the octave of the open note. On your top E string (in standard tuning), that’s the very next E that occurs in the sequence – E3 in scientific pitch notation.

Here’s a quick look at where you can find every E on the fretboard (24-fret guitar, tuned to E Standard):

E4
B3
G3
D3
A2
E2

If you spent any part of your life as a band geek, pick a single string and try playing each note/fret from lowest to highest, sequentially.

Does that sound familiar? If so, it’s because this is your chromatic scale, but starting at whatever note that string is tuned to (aka the ‘open’ note on the string, strumming without fretting a note) instead of concert Bb. You’d do the same thing on piano by pressing each key – white and black – in order.

Knowing this and the notes in the chromatic scale (or on a piano), we can easily play only the ‘white keys’, aka natural notes, from the open string to last fret you have.

E4
B3
G3
D3
A2
E2

If the string is tuned to E (as the top and bottom string are, out of standard tuning), the very first fret will be the next note on your keyboard/chromatic scale: F. Then the next fret is F# (which you’d skip if you want to only play the white keys), then G, G# and so on.

If we visualize a six-string, 24-fret guitar tuned to E standard as a stack of keyboards, it’d look like this:

2 Once you learn a chord/shape, you can slide it around the fretboard like you can on a piano

But there’s a catch. When you play those chords way up near your headstock, you are usually playing some open strings, right? The guitar is holding/fretting those notes for you. Those open notes happen to be valid members of that chord.

Consider a Cmaj, for example – you can slide that C major (Cmaj) chord two frets down the fretboard to play a Dmaj using the ‘C shape’, as they say. You can move it two more frets to transpose it into an Emaj.

The thing is, you can’t play it exactly the same way as you do at the top of the guitar. You have to essentially take the top of the guitar with you when you move a chord down the fretboard by placing your index finger across the fretboard. This is called ‘barring’, where your finger is effectively serving as the nut of the guitar.

Fmaj is another one of the chords we often learn early on. But what isn’t obvious at first is that Fmaj is just Emaj using the ‘E shape’ (Emaj is the shape’s eponymous chord), starting at the next fret. But you can’t play all those open notes the way you did with Emaj. You have to use your index finger across the first fret.

For Emaj, you’re playing an E on the open top string (the low one) as well as on the top – it is the tonal/root note of the chord, after all – but when you slide the whole chord down a fret, barring the first fret, you’re playing Fs there instead. You can slide that whole shape two more frets to make it a Gmaj using the ‘E shape’.

Bar chords are pretty infamous, especially with beginners. They’re awkward and difficult at first, and they’re a bit more tiring on an acoustic guitar. But they’re necessary for playing full chords farther down the fretboard without a capo.

This is the whole basis for the CAGED system you may have heard of. If you learn those five major chord shapes, you’ve essentially learned how to play a major chord anywhere on the fretboard – just slide and bar!

I feel like if you ask ten guitarists to explain CAGED, you’ll get 11 different answers. It was easier for me to start with the layout of this guitar contraption first. Eventually all this other stuff began to click.

3 If you rest your four fingers on your fretting hand over four contiguous frets, you have two entire octaves beneath your fingers

Even if you know a bit about music already, stringed instruments seem daunting from the outside looking in. It may be even more daunting if you’re already proficient in a couple of non-stringed instruments, since you have a stronger grasp of what you don’t know. But it’s really not as scary as we assume it to be.

Having our hands together on adjacent octaves is one of the first positions we learn on piano. We can assume an equivalent position on a guitar just by positioning our fingers over four adjacent frets.

You may hear people talk about a section of the fretboard like this as a ‘box’. You’re making a box with your fingers over the fretboard, and within it you will find the same root note three times.

With your guitar in standard tuning, you may have already noticed that the top and bottom strings are tuned to different octaves of the same note. Of course, playing the same fret on both of these strings will produce the same note, two octaves apart. There’s another octave of that note in the middle – from your middle finger, it’s up two strings, and to the right two frets. We can look at all the Gs on the fretboard and see that relationship:

E4
B3
G3
D3
A2
E2

So if you want to play a scale out of G (i.e., with G as your root note), first find a G on your low E string (the top string) – in standard tuning, that’ll be on your 3rd and 15th fret – then put your middle finger on it. This will essentially place you in a box to play any scale mode you’d like out of G (major, minor, blues, etc.).

It’s worth noting that you can play pretty much any scale out of any position on the fretboard, but it gets a little scarier because you aren’t always starting on your root note. That’s more advanced, but you can unlock a lot of musical power just by learning how to play this G major scale in the second position and sliding that same pattern up and down the fretboard. You’re starting at G on the top E string, and ending on G on the other side (the bottom E string).

You can slide that whole pattern up one fret and turn it into a G# major scale. Or to the next fret after that, and you’re playing an A Major scale.

Again, you could literally play these same scales anywhere else on the fretboard, but you wouldn’t be starting with the tonal/root note on the top string as we are with this shape. If starting from the top string, you’d be starting from another note in the scale, but playing the notes of that scale.

Looking again at the layout of a single note (C, in this case) you can probably start to see how this is possible – the first available C on the top string is on the 8th fret, but we could for sure play those same notes closer to the headstock, but starting at another note in the scale:

E4
B3
G3
D3
A2
E2

I should also note that I kinda lied – because the guitar is tuned to fifths, it’s inaccurate to say all the notes in those two octaves are beneath your fingers. If you want to play a true chromatic scale starting at a note on your top string and ‘crossing the river’ to the bottom string, you’ll have to reach outside of that box to an adjacent fret for all but one string, similar to how you’d have to stretch to reach some of the notes on a given octave on keys. But don’t sweat that too much if you’re just starting.

This tip will probably become more obvious for you if/when you start practicing scales, but I think piano people just rolling into guitar can benefit from this one. A single position on the fretboard is like having your hands on two adjacent octaves on a piano.

4 You don’t need to play every charted note of a chord to be playing that chord

It’s inevitable — one day you’ll be playing a song you’ve always wanted to play and run into an intimidating chord shape you’ve never seen before. Or perhaps you’ve noticed how difficult it must be to play all the notes in a G shape as you move it down the fretboard – it’s pretty much impossible to play all those notes without a capo at that position.

When this happens, try omitting a note or two if it’ll help you clamp down on the rest. Play the first three strings or the last three. Don’t let a difficult chord slow you down, even if it means only playing three notes of it.

Experienced guitarists do this routinely. If you’ve heard guitarists talk about ‘triads’ at all, this idea rolls into those nicely. Triads are often spoken of as the building blocks for major chords – they’re sort of just parts of the chords you’ve already learned.

5 Guitarists tend to learn their way around intervals more than specific notes and scales

This is worth knowing early on I think, because in more formal musical settings we aren’t really thinking in these terms. We’re sight reading or rehearsing an entire piece as it was composed, reading the sheet music. We don’t think too much about the space between the tones we produce.

I know I never explicitly thought about intervals unless we get into improvisation. Even then, we tend to just play the notes in the scale/key we know the piece is in.

This becomes a bit more apparent as you get a feel for how the strings relate to each other, and as you practice moving chord and scale shapes all around the fretboard. The space between the tones is truly where the music is.

6 Playing out of other tunings isn’t as difficult as it is intimidating

The first time you tune your guitar to something that’s not E standard, it’ll likely be because you sought out how to play a favorite song that’s in a different tuning. Early on we tend to do what the tab/notation/video is telling us to play, without thinking about it too much.

It turns out, drop tunings (Drop D, Drop C, Drop B, etc) are basically all the same.

Not literally, but in the sense that you can play any song that’s in Drop Whatever tuning in any another drop tuning. It’ll simply be transposed into a lower or higher key.

Same with standard tunings. You can tune down to D Standard and play any song you learned in E standard. The relationships/intervals between the strings stays the same – you still play the same chords and patterns you played it in before, but it’s a full step deeper.

While you’ll be playing your song in the lower tuning using the same chords, you’re not playing the same literal chords. That is, the actual chord names change. If playing a familiar E Standard song in D Standard, you can play the same chords.

For example, you can play what would be a Gmaj in the same place on the neck that you first learned, except now it’s technically an Fmaj. You can do this with all the chords in the song, and the chords will still sound good together.

D4
A3
F3
C3
G2
D2

You may have already learned that it’s OK to include or omit your ring finger on the A string when playing a G shape. Above you can see why: you’re playing a valid note for that chord whether you play the open note (A) or fret the C on the third fret. But in this tuning, it’ll technically be an Fmaj.

E4
B3
G3
D3
A2
E2

Same chord (Fmaj), different tunings. Once you figure this out, you might start to think of them as ‘types’ of tunings, rather than distinct tunings. There are other types of tunings where the strings are tuned to different intervals, but I haven’t really gone beyond standard and drop tunings yet – they’ve been keeping me pretty busy.

Other alternative tunings deviate a bit more than drop and standard tunings. A ‘drop’ tuning is just a standard tuning with the top string tuned down a whole step.

Drop D was my first non-standard tuning adventure, and I’d wager it’s a popular first. It’s simply our tried-and-true E Standard tuning with the top string tuned down from E2 to D2 – one whole step.

This has a handful of effects:

1. It gives you one additional deeper note – it doesn’t seem like it’d add much low end, but it makes a difference
2. It allows you to play power chords with a single finger
3. You can still play along with a song that’s in standard tuning, but you now need to omit (or account for) that top string when playing chords

Having started on other instruments where we typically think of C as sort of the ‘first’ note, I’ve been a big fan of Drop C tuning. Here’s Drop C, loaded up with a power chord on the top three strings:

Try clicking to highlight the notes in your power chord above to see all the other places in the fretboard you could play that chord!

7 Speaking of power chords, they’re a great place to start (re-)learning about chord nomenclature

Having more or less put down piano for the monophonic trumpet and multi-timbre drums, I’d forgotten the basics of chords when coming back to a polyphonic instrument in guitar. If you’re anything like me, you may not know/remember how they get their names.

Now that you know the space between the notes (bka the ‘intervals’) is what makes it sound the way it sounds, this is probably a good time to start understanding where these dang chord names come from, starting with one of the simplest: power chords.

Power chords are an easily-unlocked addition to your guitar chops. On guitar tabs, they’re the chords that have a note and a ‘5’ – E5, G5, D5, etc.

They’re called that simply because a power chord is a tonal/root note (pick one – I’ll go with G) and its ‘perfect’ 5th, then typically the next octave of the tonal note. Where a regular 5th is simply 5 steps away, a perfect fifth is 7 because reasons – music theory gets weird/interesting, but you don’t need to know much to get this far.

Using G as an example, our perfect fifth away from it is D. The ‘circle of 5ths’ gives us an easy way to figure this out quickly – find your note on the circle (G) and the next one in the sequence is the perfect 5th (D). For D, it’s A. For C, it’s G.

Back to tunings. Continuing with G as an example, I’m giving you the easy way first – but we need to be in a drop tuning. From E Standard, tune the top string (the low E) down a whole step to D. Now you’re in Drop D. You can play the first three open strings (mute/ignore the bottom three) together and they’ll sound good – this is a D5 power chord. You’re playing a D on the bottom string, an A on the next, and a D again on the next.

Returning to E standard, you can’t just use one finger anymore. You’d go about playing a G5 by first finding a G on your top string (on the 3rd fret, because now the string is again tuned to E – the next/1st fret is F, then F#, then G, just like it would happen on a piano) and plant your index finger there.

Then on the next two strings, put another finger (probably your pinky – ring is awkward) two frets down, on the 5th fret in this case and strum those strings only. You’re now holding a G, a D, and then another G. Root, perfect 5th, root again (but the next octave).

As you’ve already learned, you can slide that whole shape a fret to the right to turn that G5 into a G#5, or another fret to make it an A5.

So you can practice that all up and down the board, but it’s worth knowing you can do this starting on the next string, too. In E Standard, let’s mute (or avoid playing) the top E string, and choose a root note on that next lowest string – the A. Plant your index finger wherever you want, then do that same power chord shape with your pinky on the next two strings (or your pinky and ring, whatever feels natural).

One of my favorite songs that illustrate this idea is I Am Broken Too, by Killswitch Engage. The opening/main riff is just power chords, as is the case for many songs across all flavors of rock that employ gain effects on guitars.

All those words probably sounds spooky, but hopefully you see how simple it is in practice. Just learn the shape, and you can pick a note anywhere on either of those top two strings, then put together a power chord by grabbing the next two strings, +2 frets. The relationship between the tones is what makes the power chord (the P5, as it’s notated) a power chord.

On that note, I have one more…

8 Playing only a couple strings while avoiding the adjacent ones is a rudimentary part of playing many songs, so cozy up

Rock and metal guitar in particular will often only be playing two-tone chords, omitting the octave on a power chord. With high-gain guitar tones, you often don’t need more than two notes for a big, full sound.

As a beginner, targeting two strings down the middle of the fretboard without hitting (or while muting) the nearby strings is intimidating, but it’s a necessary technique for this play style. It’s good to keep in mind from the beginning os you can build your comfort with doing this over time.

That’s all for now. I tried to write this in a way that would’ve helped me when I first was getting into guitar, so hopefully it helps someone else out there starting from a similar spot.

I’ll leave a list of links for resources that I’ve found to be the cleanest, most infonutrient-dense resources on guitar:

• Absolutelty Understand Guitar (youtube)
• JustinGuitar
• Fender.com is pretty great for exploring scales in particular, but has a Resources Home page with additional goodness
• If you’re DIYish enough to be getting into setting up your own guitars (string/action height, setting up a tremolo), Perfecto De Castro’s Youtube channnel is a treasure trove of high-quality content on that and more

If you made it this far, and you happen to be a developer...

Each interactive component in this post is custom work that I intend to port to Svelte 5 and release as a framework-agnostic open-source project. There are a lot of great options out there for telling similar stories, but if the issue wasn't poopy responsiveness, it was acecssibility or something else.

I was also liking the idea of showing the notes on the fretboard, so I started with that functionality in mind first.

A11y-wise, they could all be improved, but I’m pretty happy simply having avoided SVGs.

Anyway, If you’re interested in being involved, just reach out.