The Fingerboard: Strings, Frets and Positions
If you have chosen guitar, bass or violin, this site draws your instrument as a board crossed by horizontal lines and asks you to click on it. Here is how to read it.
A keyboard is a line, a fingerboard is a grid
A keyboard lays every pitch out in one row, left to right, low to high. Each pitch has exactly one home; find it once and you have found it for good.
A fingerboard has several strings, each a row of pitches in its own right, and the rows overlap — a string does not begin where the one below it left off, it begins partway along it. So the same pitch is reachable in two, three, sometimes four places, and none of them is the real one.
That is not a flaw to route around. It is the reason players talk about fingering at all: you pick which place to take, by what your hand must do next. A keyboard offers no such choice.
Strings, from lowest to highest
Each horizontal line is one string. The drawing follows the convention tablature uses: the highest-sounding string is the top line, the lowest is the bottom one. A guitar shows six lines, a bass four, a violin four. Counting down from the top is how guitarists number their strings, so the top line is the first.
The open string is position zero
The leftmost cell, before the first fret, is the open string: the string sounding on its own, nothing pressed. Every cell after it adds exactly one semitone. One fret, one semitone; twelve frets, an octave, and the string sounds the name it did open.
So a fingerboard is a map you can calculate on rather than memorise. Know where one note lives and how far the next is, and you count cells to it. A keyboard will not do that for you: its steps are equal musically but not physically, and black and white make some look wide, others narrow.
Why the same note keeps coming back
Put the two together. If neighbouring strings sit five semitones apart, the fifth cell of the lower one and the open cell of the higher one are the same pitch, and everything above them doubles up the same way. That is every pair on a bass, and four of the five pairs on a guitar; across the one pair only four semitones apart, the meeting point falls a cell earlier. On a violin, seven semitones apart, it is the seventh position.
The violin has no frets
Look at the violin and you will see no vertical wires — honestly so: a violin has none. The board is smooth and the finger stops the string wherever it lands, which is what lets a violinist slide from one pitch into another as a fretted instrument cannot.
The positions are still discrete, though, which is why the grid holds: a violinist’s fingers land in definite, practised places — the instrument does not enforce them, the player does. In place of frets the drawing shows position marks at the usual landmarks. Use them to orient yourself, but do not treat “fret” as a word every instrument earns.
Tuning is why shapes do not transfer
How far apart the strings sit is the tuning — a choice, not a law.
- Bass: every pair a perfect fourth apart — five semitones, the same gap all the way across.
- Guitar: fourths too, with one exception. Between the third and the second string the gap is a major third, four semitones.
- Violin: perfect fifths throughout — seven semitones per pair, a much wider reach over only four strings.
A shape is a set of cells in a fixed arrangement, so it means whatever the gaps underneath mean. Move a guitar shape onto a violin and every gap it crosses has widened from five semitones to seven: same fingers, different chord. Learn the layout, not the picture — the picture belongs to one tuning.
Common mistakes to avoid
- Hunting for the one correct spot. There usually is not one. Any cell that sounds the note is right.
- Calling every mark a fret. On the violin they are landmarks; the string is free between them.
- Carrying a shape across instruments. A shape is a set of gaps, and gaps change with the tuning.
Now play
The drill below names a note and asks you to find it. Choose your instrument with the control above it; the whole site follows that choice. Any cell that sounds the note counts, in any octave. Answer wrong and every place it lives lights up at once: this page’s grid, drawn for one note.