This article will help absolute beginners to start navigating guitar's fretboard.

Your guitar's fretboard has 6 strings, each divided in 24 frets. The top string is the fattest one - we call it 6th string. Below it goes 5th string, and so on, until 1st string, which is the thinnest.

If you don't press your finger over fretboard and pluck strings from 6th ( the fattest ) to 1st string ( the thinnest ) - you will hear notes in the following order:

E - 6th, A - 5th, D - 4th, G - 3rd, B - 2nd, E - 1st

You might have noticed that 2 different strings - 6th and 1st have the same note E on them, they even sound differently. How come?

Apparenty, a note with same letter can be in multiple octaves. It is where International Pitch Notation proves to be very useful. E on 6th string is E2, mening note E in 2nd octave. While E on 1st string is E4, meaning note E in 4th octave. The higher the number of octave - the higher the sound. Exercises here use International Pitch Notation so that your device can speek it, and you could learn to play it without looking into your screen.

For now it's enough to know that octaves will help to identify note and that same note in different octaves will sound "nicely".

Make sure to memorise the notes of the open strings with the "Open string" exercise. Get the speed of at least 1 second and accuracy of at least 0.9 before moving to the next level.

This funny phraze can help you to memorise them: Eddie Ate Dynamite Good Bye Eddie!

It's great that you want to learn guitar notes, you might be already familiar with good reasons to do so. If not, here's the overivew of why to learn guitar notes!

Where is the music staff - that sheet with lines and dots professional musicians are using? This is called standard notation. As a beginner guitarist myself, I found staff much harder to read. But after mastering navigating guitar notes on fretboard with International Pitch Notation, we will start practicing standard notation with our more advanced exercises that teach with the staff.

For now, go and practice the "Open notes" exercise.

Next - read Mnemonics, frets 5 and 10.