Guitar
* Get it? get the joke?
Gitori's Find the Notes game challenges users to find a given note in a highlighted area of the fretboard. Over the last 3 years, the game has been played by over 10,000 people, and I've collected 275,169 different data points on note identification. Based on that data, I have a heatmap of the hardest notes to identify on the fretboard. Reds are the hardest and greens are the easiest.
Summary of findings
- The upper middle of the neck is hardest. The G string at frets 6 to 9 is the red zone, with the B and D strings at frets 7 to 9 close behind. The single worst spot, the G string at fret 8 (E♭), is answered incorrectly about one-third of the time.
F♯
G
A♭
B♭
C♯
D
E♭
E
B♭
F♯
- The edges are easiest. The low E string is the easiest string, then the high E. Open strings and the 12th fret are missed about 6% of the time, against roughly 20% around frets 8 and 9.
E
F
E♭
E
A
E
F
G
E♭
E
- Sharps and flats are harder. What a shocker! 😜 About 16% of answers on accidentals are wrong, against 12% on natural notes, and even the correct ones take about 11% longer to find (roughly 2.5 seconds against 2.2). F♯, B♭, A♭ and E♭ are the hardest note names; E is the easiest.