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The home stretch of fretboard memorization: the five remaining notes, each with two names (C♯/D♭ and so on — enharmonic equivalents you can treat as interchangeable here). The shortcut is easy — find the natural note and shift one fret — but two drills burn them in for good: the cycle of fourths (and fifths) up a single string, where the familiar interval lets you hear a wrong note, and the one-note-per-string chromatic scale that sends your hand all over the neck. Finish these and you know the entire fretboard.
What follows is this lesson’s section of the Course Guide — you can read it here or in the full guide →
There are five remaining notes on the fretboard to memorize: the sharps and flats. In music notation, if you put a sharp symbol (#) after a note name, it raises the pitch of that note by one semitone, or one fret. A flat symbol (♭) similarly lowers the pitch of the note by one semitone.
The five notes we haven’t covered yet each go by two names: A#/B♭, C#/D♭, D#/E♭, F#/G♭, and G#/A♭. Technically, B# is the same pitch as C, C♭ is B, E# is F, and F♭ is E, but you won’t see those used much in practice. There are some cases in music theory where which note name you use matters, but for purposes of this course, the note names in each pair are interchangeable.
One way to find these notes on the fretboard is to find the note without a sharp or flat and then move up or down a fret to the target note. It’s fine to start out doing that, but it’s a good idea to practice finding them enough that you end up knowing them by rote.
Exercise 1: On a single string, practice finding all of the notes in the cycle of 4ths:
B - E - A - D - G - C - F - Bb - Eb - Ab - Db - Gb. Do this on each of the six strings.
Exercise 2: On a single string, practice finding all of the notes in the cycle of 5ths:
F - C - G - D - A - E - B - F# - C# - G# - D# - A#. Do this on each of the six strings.
Exercise 3: Play the chromatic scale with one note per string (e.g., play an A on the low E string, A# on the A string, B on the D string, etc.), reversing direction when you reach one of the outer strings and continuing up the scale. You can start on any note in the scale.
Exercise 4: Repeat Exercise 3, but playing down the chromatic scale.
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