So how would one learn all the notes on the fretboard? Well, by constant practice! There’s a nice application called tenuto (I’m not affiliated with Tenuto in any way — but I liked it more then anything else), which I downloaded and started practicing daily. Things didn’t go well though: To me, a fretboard is just a grid of 72 notes — all “the same”, and it was pretty hard to memorize this non-structured information.

That’s how a fretboard looked to me

The first step to minimize the workload is to focus on natural notes only: Knowing the locations of the natural notes, it’s easy to infer all the rest. This was an improvement, but it didn’t help me much.

Natural-only notes on the fretboard

Clearly, I needed a system to refer to while thinking about the fretboard. It had to be a visual system, because it’s much easier to deal with visual terms rather then abstract ones.

The good news is that a guitar already has convenient visual “anchors” — certain frets are marked with “dots”.

Frets 3, 5, 7 ,9 and 12 are marked with dots

The bad news is that googling the topic didn’t show much results. So I made up a few mnemonics that happen to work nicely and which I want to describe. Below are 4 simple steps that should help to quickly memorize a fretboard.