Guitar String Notes Explained: The 6 Open Strings (E-A-D-G-B-E)

Ask any guitarist to name the strings and you’ll hear the same six letters, low to high: E, A, D, G, B, E. Those are the notes of the six open strings in standard tuning, running from the thick string nearest your face down to the thin string nearest the floor. That’s the whole answer — but it repays a closer look, because those six letters are the foundation every chord, scale, and riff is built on. Here’s the master reference I give every student:

I’ve taught this to hundreds of beginners, and I promise you it clicks faster than it looks. Below I’ll walk through the names and numbers, clear up the “top vs. bottom” confusion that trips up nearly everyone, give you a couple of memory tricks (and tell you when to throw them away), and — the part almost no beginner guide bothers to explain — why the guitar is tuned this particular way. Curious what those pitches sound like or where each string sits in hertz? Our free note frequency chart plays every note and shows its exact frequency. If you’re already comfortable with the letters and want to put them to work, our guide to reading guitar tabs and the first eight chords for beginners are the natural next steps.

Guitar String Names and Numbers

Every string has both a name (its musical note) and a number, and guitarists use the two interchangeably. The name is simply the note the string sounds when you pluck it open, with nothing fretted. The number is its position in the set — and here is the detail that surprises everyone: the numbering starts from the thinnest string, not the thickest.

• The 1st string is the thin, high-pitched E (the one closest to the floor when you play). Highest pitch, smallest number.
• The 6th string is the thick, low-pitched E (the one closest to the ceiling). Lowest pitch, biggest number.
• In between, from thin to thick, are B (2nd), G (3rd), D (4th), and A (5th).

So when a teacher says “play the third string,” they mean the G string. When a tab labels the bottom line “E,” it means the 6th string, the low E. Both systems point at the same six pieces of wound and plain steel — you’ll use names when you’re talking about notes and chords, and numbers when you’re talking about physical strings and fretting-hand positions. Get comfortable flipping between them, because you’ll meet both constantly.

Notice the two E strings on the ends. They share a letter but they are not the same pitch — the low E (6th) and the high E (1st) sit two full octaves apart. That’s why the sequence E-A-D-G-B-E reads the same forwards and backwards: it’s a palindrome, bookended by E at both ends.

”Top” and “Bottom” Strings: The Great Beginner Confusion

Here’s where I have to stop every new student and untangle a knot, because the words “top” and “bottom” mean the opposite of what your eyes tell you.

When guitarists say the top strings, they mean the highest-pitched strings — the thin ones (the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd: high E, B, G). When they say the bottom strings, they mean the lowest-pitched strings — the thick ones (the 6th, 5th, and 4th: low E, A, D).

But look down at your guitar in playing position and the thick low E string is physically at the top, nearest your chin, while the thin high E is at the bottom, nearest your knee. So the “top” strings are physically on the bottom, and the “bottom” strings are physically on the top. Maddening, right?

The fix is the same one I teach for reading tab: stop thinking about physical up and down, and think about pitch instead. “Top” and “bottom” refer to the top and bottom of the pitch range — high and low in sound, not in space. A high note is a “top” note. Once you retrain your brain to hear those words as pitch words, the confusion evaporates and never comes back. Until then, when someone says “mute the bottom strings,” they mean the thick, low-sounding ones — the E, A, and D.

How to Remember the String Names

For your first week, lean on a mnemonic — a sentence whose first letters spell the string notes. Reciting from the thick 6th string up to the thin 1st (E-A-D-G-B-E), the two I hear most are:

• Eddie Ate Dynamite, Good Bye Eddie
• Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears

And if you’d rather memorize the other direction, from the thin 1st string down to the thick 6th (E-B-G-D-A-E), try:

• Every Boy Gets Donuts After Eating

Any sentence works as long as it makes you smile — the sillier the mental picture, the better it sticks. Elephants and donkeys lodge in memory in a way that a dry list of letters never will.

But now the honest teacher’s take, because this matters more than the mnemonic itself: a mnemonic is training wheels, and you should take them off fast. Use the sentence for one week, no more. Then spend three deliberate days on a simple recall drill — pluck each open string in turn and say its note out loud, “E, A, D, G, B, E,” slowly, then a little faster each day. Within seventy-two hours the raw letters will come to you quicker than the sentence about elephants ever could. Every extra week you spend translating “Elephants And Donkeys…” in your head before you can name a string is a week you’re not reading the fretboard directly. Drop the crutch early and the notes become instinct.

Why Is a Guitar Tuned E-A-D-G-B-E?

This is the question that separates players who use the notes from players who actually understand the instrument, and it’s the part I most enjoy teaching. The short version: the guitar is tuned almost entirely in perfect fourths, with one deliberate exception — a major third between the G and B strings.

Walk up the strings and measure each jump:

• Low E to A — a perfect fourth
• A to D — a perfect fourth
• D to G — a perfect fourth
• G to B — a major third (the odd one out, a half step smaller)
• B to high E — back to a perfect fourth

So why break the pattern? If the guitar were tuned in straight fourths all the way up, the top string would land on F instead of E, and the tuning would be gorgeously uniform — every scale and chord shape would repeat identically across all six strings. Bass players and some jazz guitarists love that consistency. But it comes at a brutal cost for chords: with straight fourths, the fingerings for common open chords and barre chords demand stretches the human hand can barely reach. Your fingers simply aren’t long enough to play a comfortable C or G shape.

The major-third break between G and B is the ancient compromise that solves this. By pulling those two strings a half step closer together in pitch, it squeezes chord shapes into a reachable four-fret span, so an ordinary hand can wrap around a full six-string chord. That single adjustment is why the guitar is such a friendly chording instrument — and it’s the reason our beginner chord shapes fit under your fingers at all.

There’s an elegant bonus, too. Bookending the tuning with E two octaves apart makes the top two strings mirror the bottom two, an octave higher: the low E and A on the bottom answer the high E and (nearly) B on top. That symmetry is a gift to chord voicings and to your ear. This tuning wasn’t handed down on a stone tablet — it evolved over centuries of players and luthiers settling on the arrangement that balanced singable melody, rich chords, and hand-span logic. E-A-D-G-B-E won because it’s the sweet spot. You give up a little pattern tidiness in the upper strings and get an instrument that fits the human hand in return.

Guitar String Notes on the Fretboard

The six open strings are your reference points — the anchors from which every other note on the neck is measured. Press a string at the first fret and its pitch rises one half step; each fret you move up adds another half step. So the notes climb through the musical alphabet — A, B, C, D, E, F, G, then back to A — with the sharps and flats filling the gaps. The catch worth memorizing: there is no sharp or flat between B and C, and none between E and F (those two pairs are only a half step apart naturally), while every other letter pair has a sharp/flat in between. That’s the entire note system in one paragraph.

There’s a beautiful shortcut hiding in the tuning called the 5th-fret rule, and it’s how guitarists tune by ear. Fret any string at the 5th fret and it sounds the same note as the next thinner string played open — because the strings are mostly a fourth apart, and a fourth is five frets. So the 5th fret of the low E gives you A (matching the open A string), the 5th fret of A gives you D, the 5th fret of D gives you G. The one exception is that G-to-B major third: to match the open B string, you fret the G string at the 4th fret instead of the 5th. Then it’s back to the 5th fret on the B string to match the high E. The pattern is 5-5-5-4-5 — memorize that little exception and the whole neck starts to make sense.

One more landmark: the 12th fret is the octave. Every string, fretted at the 12th fret, plays the same note as its open string, one octave higher. Low E open is E2; low E at the 12th fret is E3. The 12th fret is the halfway point of the string, and it splits the fretboard into two mirror-image halves — which is exactly why guitars mark it with a double dot.

Guitar String Notes on a Piano

If you know your way around a keyboard, mapping the guitar’s open strings to piano keys makes their pitches concrete. Middle C on the piano is C4, sitting just left of center. Here’s where each open string lands relative to it:

Notice how low the guitar actually sits: five of its six open strings are below middle C, and only the thin high E pokes above it. The whole open-string range spans two octaves, from E2 up to E4. This is also why guitar music is written an octave higher than it sounds — if it were notated at true pitch, it would sit buried below the staff on all those ledger lines. A useful thing to know if you ever play alongside a pianist and wonder why the guitar feels so much deeper than it looks on paper.

Do Acoustic, Electric, and Classical Guitars Use the Same String Notes?

Yes — and this is one of the most reassuring facts for a new player. Acoustic, electric, and classical guitars all use the identical E-A-D-G-B-E tuning, the same string numbers, and the same open-string notes. A G chord is a G chord on every one of them. Everything you learn about string names, fretboard notes, chords, and scales transfers completely from one instrument to the next, so you’re never starting over when you switch. Whether you’re eyeing a beginner acoustic, a beginner electric, or a full-size acoustic to grow into, the notes under your fingers are the same.

The bass guitar is the one relative that differs, and only slightly: it uses just the lowest four strings — E, A, D, G — tuned one full octave below the guitar’s equivalent strings. So a bassist’s string names are a subset of yours, an octave deeper. If a low, foundational role appeals to you more than chords and melody, our guide to the best beginner bass guitars is where to start; you already know two-thirds of its string names just from reading this. (The 12-string guitar is another cousin — it doubles each string into pairs, or “courses,” but the six note names stay exactly the same.)

Notes versus gauge — the distinction beginners miss. The note a string plays is set by its tuning, not by its thickness. String gauge describes how thick the string is, measured in thousandths of an inch, and it affects how the string feels and sounds — heavier strings need more finger pressure but give a fuller, louder tone, while lighter strings are easier on new fingertips and bend more readily. But a light low E and a heavy low E both tune to the same E; gauge changes the feel, never the pitch. Choosing a gauge that suits your hands and your music makes a real difference to how enjoyable the guitar is to play, and our roundup of the best acoustic guitar strings breaks down the common gauges, materials, and which sets suit beginners versus experienced players. Fresh strings that hold their tuning are one of the cheapest upgrades a player can make.

A Quick Word on Alternate Tunings

Everything above assumes standard tuning, which is what you’ll use for the vast majority of your playing and every tuning you should learn first. But guitarists do sometimes retune strings to unlock different chord voicings or a heavier sound, and there’s one alternate tuning worth knowing early: Drop D.

Drop D changes exactly one string — you lower the 6th string from E down a whole step to D, so the tuning becomes D-A-D-G-B-E. That single change lets you play a power chord on the bottom three strings with one finger laid flat across a fret, which is why Drop D is everywhere in rock and metal. It’s also the friendliest alternate tuning to experiment with, because five of your six strings stay put — only the low E moves, and it’s easy to drop it and bring it back.

Beyond Drop D lie deeper waters — open tunings for slide playing, DADGAD for folk, and more — but those can wait. Master the standard E-A-D-G-B-E first, get the note names into your fingers, and everything else becomes a small adjustment rather than a fresh start. If a string ever won’t hold a new tuning, that’s usually a sign it’s old and worn — a fresh set from our strings guide will settle in and stay put. Learn these six notes cold, and you’ve laid the foundation the entire fretboard is built on.