Meet the fretboard
Six strings and twenty frets suggests a hundred and twenty notes. There are twelve. Everything else is a repeat.
A guitar has six strings and around twenty frets, which suggests something like a hundred and twenty notes to learn. There are twelve. Everything else is a repeat.
This is step one of the guitar path. It assumes you have a guitar in your hands and nothing else.
The parts you actually need to name
The nut is the ridge at the end of the neck, nearest the headstock. The frets are the metal strips running across. When someone says “third fret” they mean the space between the second and third metal strips, not the strip itself.
The dots inlaid into the neck are fret markers, at frets 3, 5, 7 and 9, then a double marker at 12. They are there purely so you can find your place without counting.
The strings, low to high
Standard tuning, from the thickest string to the thinnest: E, A, D, G, B, E.
The two outer strings are both E, two octaves apart. Plenty of mnemonics exist for the order and most of them are worse than simply saying it aloud a few times while you play each string.
Now the thing that confuses everybody at the start, and it is worth getting straight immediately.
In diagrams and tab, the thickest string is drawn at the bottom. On your actual guitar, it is on top. Look down while you play and the low E is nearest you, above the others. Look at a diagram and it is the bottom line.
The diagrams are not wrong and neither are your eyes. They are ordered by pitch, not by physical position — higher-sounding strings are drawn higher on the page, the same way notes are arranged in every other kind of music notation. Physical layout was never what the lines were describing.
You will read this explained the other way round in plenty of places, usually as “tab looks like your fretboard as you look down at it”. That is a tidy-sounding claim and it is simply not true. Assume pitch order, and diagrams stop being disorienting.
One fret is one semitone
Move up one fret and you have moved up one semitone — the smallest step in Western music. Move up twelve frets and you have gone up an octave, arriving at the same note name you started on.
That is why the twelfth fret has a double marker. It is the halfway point of the string, and everything above it repeats what is below it.
So the fretboard contains twelve notes, laid out five or six times over. The repetition is not clutter — it is the whole reason a single shape can be slid up the neck to play the same chord in a different key.
The awkward bit nobody mentions
Here is the thing that explains more beginner confusion than anything else on the instrument.
The gap between most adjacent strings is five semitones. E to A is five frets. A to D is five. D to G is five. B to E is five.
G to B is four.
That one irregularity is deliberate — it makes common chord shapes reachable by a human hand — and it is the reason a chord shape does not simply move sideways across the strings the way it moves up the neck. It is also why the two thinnest strings behave slightly differently from the rest in scale patterns.
You do not need to do anything with this yet. You need to know it exists, so that when a shape does not transfer the way you expected, you know why rather than assuming you have misunderstood something.
Tuning
A guitar goes out of tune constantly, especially when new strings are settling. Tune every single time you pick it up, before anything else.
Use a clip-on tuner or a phone app. Tuning by ear is a genuinely useful skill and it is not a beginner skill — practising against an out-of-tune instrument teaches your ear the wrong intervals, which is worse than not practising at all.
Two minutes, then move on
Play each string open, one at a time, from the thickest to the thinnest, saying the name out loud: E, A, D, G, B, E.
Then find the double dot at fret twelve, play the low E string there, and compare it to the open low E. Same note, an octave up. Once you have heard that, the idea that the neck repeats stops being an abstract claim.