Fretboard Diagrams

The full fretboard diagrams depict 14 frets of a guitar fretboard with the headstock to the left and the guitar body to the right of the diagram. Here’s a blank fretboard:

The numbers below the fretboard indicate fret numbers. The thick grey line at the left of the diagram depicts the nut, and dots placed behind the nut indicate open notes. The tuning is also shown at the left of the diagram. If you purchased a poster for standard tuning then you see a C Major Scale depicted at the top; if you purchased a poster for an open tuning, you see The Major Scale for the key of the open tuning (e.g., the Open G poster has the G Major scale). Here’s a diagram depicting a C major scale in standard tuning.

All notes from the C major scale are shown across the entire fretboard. The dots are colored to correspond to scale intervals or scale degrees. If the concept of musical intervals isn’t familiar to you, know for now that each note in a scale or chord gets its own color, and different scales/chords will have different coloring schemes. When you have a chance, check out our section below on musical intervals to learn more. Here is the color key for all 12 scale degrees.

If you have difficulty distinguishing these colors due to color blindness, we offer color-blind-friendly schemes. For those with severe color blindness, we have non-color-coded, black-and-white learning materials.

Chord Diagrams

The chord diagrams depict 5 frets of a guitar fretboard. The six vertical lines represent strings (solid lines) and the five horizontal lines represent fret markers (dotted lines). The leftmost line indicates the low (6th) string and the rightmost indicates the high (1st) string. The headstock of the guitar would be at the top of the diagram, and the body of the guitar would be at the bottom of the diagram. A dot indicates that a note is fretted and played in that location. The number at the top left of the chord diagram shows the fret number at which to start. Notes marked above the diagram indicate open notes in all instances. Here are some examples of chord diagrams in standard tuning.

The notes of the chords are color-coded like the fretboard diagrams to represent the scale degrees present.

Musical Intervals

The Major Scale is the foundation of western music theory and is used as the reference scale, every other scale is represented by its form relative to The Major Scale. To use the system of musical intervals, we use the numbers 1 through 7 to represent the seven tones of The Major Scale (do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do). With musical intervals we represent scales or chords by the relationship of the notes in the scale to each other instead of with specific letter notes. We can specify a key or root note and then that note becomes the 1 and all the rest of the notes are determined by their relationship to the 1. The Major Scale is by definition (1-2-3-4-5-6-7). In the key of C, this becomes (C-D-E-F-G-A-B) and in the key of G this is (G-A-B-C-D-E-F#). The exact notes of the G major scale and the C major scale are different, but the relationships between the notes are the same relatively. It works for different scales too, for example the musical interval formula for the natural minor scale is (1-2-b3-4-5-b6-b7). In the key of A minor this would be (A-B-C-D-E-F-G), but in the key of C minor this would be (C-D-Eb-F-G-Ab-Bb). Again, the exact notes for the A minor scale and the C minor scale differ, but the relationships between the notes are the same for each key. We can use this system to express scales, chords, arpeggios, and even chord progressions.