Finding Notes on the Fretboard

Part 2 of the course starts here. You know a dozen chords and a few tunes; now it’s time to understand the fretboard, so the shapes start to make sense.

One string at a time

Moving up one fret raises a note by a half step. The musical alphabet runs A B C D E F G and starts again, and between most neighbors there is a note in between, a sharp or flat. The exceptions are B–C and E–F, which are only a half step apart, so there’s no fret between them.

Press along one string and listen to the half steps climb. A note between two letters has two names: the fret above F is F♯ (F sharp) or G♭ (G flat), the same sound.

The 12th fret

Twelve half steps make an octave: the same letter, eight notes higher. So at the 12th fret every string plays its own open note an octave up: G, C, E, A again. Many ukuleles mark the 12th fret with two dots. Above it, the pattern of notes repeats.

Finding any note

To find a note on a string, start from the open string and count half steps. For example, D on the A string: A, A♯, B, C, C♯, D is five half steps, so it’s at the 5th fret. Useful landmarks:

• The 4th fret of the C string is E and the 5th fret of the E string is A: the notes of the next strings, as you used them for tuning.
• The dots at frets 5, 7 and 10 help you count without looking closely.
• Because of the high G, the same pitch often turns up on two or three strings.