C Major: Position 1
Position 1 covers frets 2–6 and holds eleven notes.
This position covers frets 2 to 6, and every note of C Major lies under one hand there. Six positions like it cover the whole neck, and this is the first of them.
Folded across four strings, the scale fits into a block a few frets wide, so you can reach every note without moving your hand. That block is called a position, and it is the unit you actually play in.
It is worth learning positions rather than single strings because music rarely runs up one string. Melodies jump about, and a position tells you what you can reach right now, rather than where one particular note is.
A ukulele has as many positions as a guitar, one starting on each note of the scale, because the positions come from the scale rather than from the neck. What the shorter neck changes is how far up they repeat, which is why each note has fewer places to be played.
This lesson was drafted with the help of AI and checked by a person, and it may still contain a mistake. Its diagrams are drawn by Everyfret’s own software. How Everyfret is made