Acoustic Guitar Note Chart

It’s a full map of notes on the neck of acoustic guitar (in standard tuning). Tap the dots with your mouse to explore fretboard. Use your computer keyboard to get around the widget. It is a bit like an interactive tutor that shows you where to find each note on the acoustic guitar neck. It is also a visual reference.

There are six strings with twelve frets in the main area, and each intersection contain a dot labeled with its note name. These dots are initialy dim so as not to clutter up the overview but when you click on any individual note, it will light up and stand out from the rest. This allow you to concentrate on that particular pitch while maintaining an understanding of where everything else sit on the neck. If you tap a dot, it will tell you what that note is by playing it for you as well as displaying the information in readout below the fret board. This instant connection between what you see and what you hear are useful when learning the identity of each note. That way you can check if you’ve got your head around which note lives where on the guitar.

How to Use the Guitar Fretboard Map

You can highlight all notes in OneNote. There are some buttons along the top of the fretboard you can click. Press one of them, say G or C, and it will light up any dot throughout the neck corresponding to that note. What this does is show the symmetries and repeating patterns in the guitar. This is great if you want to see where certain notes appears on different strings.

With the quiz mode, the chart become an active learning experience. Hit the Quiz Me button and the widget challenges you to select any note from the chart. Is it right? Wrong? The widget will let you know. As you work your way through a series of random prompts, your score keep track. It’s a lot quicker for reinforcing memories then just passively looking at the chart.

Change the volume of the sound using the volume slider. To do this, click on the volume slider in the controls area next to readout. Set it to a comfortabley level depending on where you are listening. Each note produce a simple synthesized tone from the audio engine that clearly identifies the pitch while not attempting to imitate a complicated acoustic sample.

The Fullscreen button will expand the widget to the full size of your screen. The fretboard also grow larger, making it easier to see the notes on small screens. Click the fullscreen button a second time to go back to the normal view.

When I click on the How to play button, it show me a quick help panel that helps remind me how to navigate around and what shortcuts to use on my keyboard. If you share this link with someone new they might like this reminder too. When you’re done practicing you can hide it again.

As you’ll notice, each note repeats every twelve frets on each string, which is one octave higher. Note how they shift positions across adjacent strings. The highlight show this nicely. Take a note name then follow it through from the lowest E string to the highest. This is just one example of a pattern that exists all over the fretboard.

All controls are accessible by keyboard alone. You can use the tab key to move focus between sliders and buttons. Hit enter/Space to activate the chosen control. So no matter what you’re used to inputting with, it will work.

Tap around on a few random dots first to get an idea of what pitches is available. Next move to the highlight option to create your own chord shape or scale. You can even quiz yourself later to remember which fret is which note. The more you mess around with it the more familiar it becomes.

Check it out for yourself and let me know how fast you find your favourite notes.