Look, I'm just gonna say it: I was a fraud.
Not in a dramatic, imposter-syndrome kind of way. More like... I could play songs. I could nail riffs. I even jammed with friends and nobody called me out. But if you pointed at a random fret and asked me "what note is that?" — I'd freeze. Like a deer. In headlights. On a highway.
And honestly? I thought that was normal. I thought knowing the actual notes was something jazz guys did. Or session musicians. Or people who went to music school and wore turtlenecks.
Turns out I was just avoiding the hard part.
The Moment It Hit Me
I remember trying to learn a solo from a YouTube tutorial. The guy said "okay, now we're gonna target the F# over this chord." And I just... sat there. F#? Where? My brain went blank. I knew shapes. I knew patterns. I could move a pentatonic box up and down the neck like a pro. But ask me to find a specific note on demand? Nope.
That's when I realized something uncomfortable: I didn't actually know my instrument. I was just really good at memorizing finger choreography.
Why Is This So Hard Anyway?
Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start guitar — the fretboard makes zero sense at first glance. A piano? Easy. White keys, black keys, everything in a nice row. You can literally see the pattern.
Guitar? It's a 2D grid of identical-looking frets. The same note shows up in like 5 different places. And just when you think you've got a pattern figured out, that weird tuning gap between the G and B strings messes everything up.
I spent years blaming myself for being "bad at theory." But it's not you. The instrument itself is genuinely confusing. Piano players don't have to deal with this nonsense.
What Didn't Work For Me
I tried a bunch of stuff over the years:
- Memorizing string by string — I'd learn all the notes on the low E, feel proud, then completely forget them a week later because I never actually used them while playing.
- Those expensive apps — Downloaded a few. Some were actually pretty good, but man, the ads. Or the subscriptions. Or the microphone that couldn't hear my acoustic properly in my echoey apartment.
- The "just learn your scales" advice — Sure, technically correct. But I'd practice my C major scale up and down, nail it at 120 BPM, and still not be able to tell you where the D was without counting from C first.
What Actually Worked
Eventually I stumbled onto something that actually stuck: random drilling. No patterns. No scales. Just... chaos.
Someone throws a note at you. You find it. Next note. Find it. Over and over.
Sounds brutal? Yeah, it kind of is. But here's the weird thing — it's supposed to feel hard. That struggle, that moment where you're scanning the fretboard going "wait, where the heck is Bb?" — that's your brain actually learning something instead of just running on autopilot.
So I Built a Thing
After getting frustrated with apps that were either too expensive, too buggy, or too distracting, I decided to just make my own tool. Something simple. Something that does exactly one thing well.
That's FretMemo.
No account to create. No app to download. No microphone that mishears your notes. No ads interrupting your practice. You just open it, hit start, and it throws random notes at you. You find them. You get faster. That's it.
One Last Thing
If it helps you, awesome. If it's not your thing, no hard feelings. Everyone learns differently.
But if you've ever felt that embarrassing pause when someone asks you to play a specific note... maybe give it a shot. That pause gets shorter. And then one day, it's just gone.