Free Bass Fretboard Notes Chart and Trainer

Every note on the bass, laid out on the neck. This free bass fretboard notes chart shows them all for 4-string, 5-string and upright, and the trainer quizzes you until you can find any note without counting up from the open string. There’s no signup and nothing to install.

Start with See every note. When the chart starts to make sense, switch to Find the note or Name the note and test yourself.

How to use the fretboard notes trainer

1. Pick your bass. 4-string, 5-string or upright. The upright view has no frets, so the lines mark half steps.
2. Look at the whole neck first. Tap any note to hear it and see every other place it lives, including the same pitch on a different string.
3. Quiz yourself. Find the note gives you a name and a string, and you tap where it lives. Name the note lights up a spot, and you pick its name.
4. Keep it small at first. Quiz one or two strings, start with the naturals, and stay below the 5th fret until it’s easy. The notes you miss come back more often.
5. Print the chart and keep it on your music stand.

Say each note out loud before you tap. If you have to count up from the open string, you don’t know that one yet.

Why learn the whole neck?

A walking line that never leaves the first five frets gets old fast. In the Ray Brown walking bass line formula, Cole Davis puts it this way: “The second category is register, and the G string is the dividing line.” And from his walking bass lines lesson: “Register matters because of the way people talk. If someone talks in the same register the whole time, you start to tune out.”

You can only move up there if you know the notes up there. Once you do, try lines in both registers with the free walking bass line builder.

Every note has a twin

The 5th fret on the E string is the same A as the open A string. Tap a note on the chart and you’ll see its twins, and that’s where fingering choices come from. “I know I always advocate for open strings,” Cole says, and on Billie’s Bounce he still plays the opening of the melody closed so it swings, then uses the open D to get up the neck.

For teachers

The trainer is free to use in lessons, and you’re welcome to link to it from your studio or school resources page. Your settings ride along in the link: set up the bass, the strings and the range, then copy the address from your browser, and your students will open the same quiz. The Print button gives you a clean chart of every note.

Keep going

• Free Walking Bass Line Builder
• Walking Bass Lines: How to Walk a Bass Line That Doesn’t Get Boring
• The Ray Brown Formula for Walking Bass Lines That Never Sound Boring
• Billie’s Bounce on Bass: Fingerings That Make a Bebop Head Swing