Where the Magic Happens: The Most-Used Guitar Positions (Backed by Data)

Telecaster with maple neck showing part of the fretboard landscape!

The guitar fretboard is a beautiful landscape spanning four octaves, with so many tantalizing possibilities! However, not all fret positions were created equal, as attested by the oft-cited quote that there is "no money above the 5th fret!" (attributed to famed studio guitarist, Tommy Tedesco). Recently, researchers from France analyzed over 1,000 professional guitar tablatures from styles like metal, rock, pop, blues/jazz, and classical. Their goal? To find out where we actually play most often on the neck of the guitar—and why. Their results may surprise you.

In this blog post, I review and summarize this paper (by Cournut et al., published here in 2021), which is entitled "What are the most used guitar positions?" If you’re an beginner to intermediate guitarist looking to get smarter or more efficient with your fretboard movements, then you’ll love what this study reveals.

📍 Key Finding: Most Action Happens Around Frets 0–5... But That's Not the Whole Story

Cournut et al.'s study analyzed over 1,000 professionally transcribed guitar tablatures ("tabs") from various genres (rock, metal, pop, jazz/blues, classical) to determine the most common fretboard positions used in guitar music. Using a novel computational method, the authors introduced the concept of RootFret (i.e., hand position) and analyzed relative chord shapes across the fretboard. Their key findings were as follows:

• First and fifth positions dominate, but positions around frets 5, 7, 10, and 12 are particularly prevalent in lead guitar parts.

• Power chords and partial barre shapes (like partial A and E shapes) are more common than complete chord voicings, especially in rock and metal.

• Relative hand position encoding reveals that guitarists favor shapes that can be shifted easily along the neck (quasi-isomorphism).

• Chord voicings vary significantly by genre; for example, metal and rock emphasize chords without thirds, while classical music prefers harmonically complete voicings (e.g., thirds and sixths).

📚 Geek Corner: The authors used a computational system that encodes each hand position (RootFret) and fret-string combo into binary vectors. This encoding allowed them to analyze millions of chord positions and reveal surprisingly consistent patterns across genres.

Popular Pitches = Open Position vs. Other Positions

Open Position Wins Out

We are all aware that open chords dominate beginner guitar playing. These chords are also known as chords in "open position" because they usually involve fretting on the 1st through 3rd frets while incorporating open strings. And open chords are typically the first chords you learn on guitar. Cournut and colleagues found that open position notes were the most frequently played, as shown in the diagram below, where circle size indicates pitch frequency across the studied tabs.

Modified Figure 4 from Cournut et al. (2021). Circles show pitch frequency, by string and fret position, measured across a set of >1000 guitar tablatures.

My take on this? First, it's really cool to see this quantified! I mean who does this, right??!!! I love it: going from 'gut' anecdotal evidence to hard scientific evidence...on a musical theme at that.

Second, it seems fairly intuitive from this that the patterns of note frequencies in open position are likely driven (in part) by higher frequencies of C major, D major, E major, E minor, G major, and A minor chords and their triads, intervals, or partial chord voicings. This suspicion of mine is partially confirmed by Cournut et al.'s Figure 9, which shows all the highest-frequency playing positions and reveals that A, C, D, and E major shapes were the most common (see below)!

Modified Figure 9 from Cournut et al.: Most frequent playing positions using at least four strings. Asterisks indicate partial strum/voicing (e.g., "A*", highlighted in yellow, omits the high 'E' string).

Other Key Positions

Despite the main finding above, Cournut et al. also showed evidence that once you move into solos, riffs, and advanced voicings as a guitar player (or perhaps just due to playing single-note melodies up and down the neck), things shift. Essentially, they found the most common lead guitar hand positions were as follows:

• 5th fret

• 7th fret

• 10th–12th fret

Specifically, looking at 50 lead guitar parts ("LeadG" in their study), they found spikes in fretted notes at these positions:

Modified Figure 6 from Cournut et al. (2021) showing estimated hand position and frets played during 50 lead guitar part sections. Spikes at frets 5, 7, and 10-12 indicate these were the most played!

If you play guitar, then you know that this is no accident—these frets allow transposition of common chord shapes (like A minor, A major, E minor, and E major mentioned above) and access to well-known pentatonic sweet spots in A and E at those positions. The message is: if you haven't yet mastered these positions, then you need to get started!

🔁 Why It Matters: The Guitar Is “Quasi-Isomorphic”

Ever noticed how you can slide the same shape up and down the neck? That’s because guitar tuning (assuming standard tuning, to EADGBE) creates repeatable chord and scale patterns across the fretboard.

The study by Cournut et al. shows that many players rely on relative chord shapes—barre chords, power chords, and pentatonic box patterns—that can be moved easily up or down the neck. So, do you want to sound smarter and play more efficiently? Then the lesson here is that you, too, should learn these patterns! You should learn to master the common movable patterns on guitar and stop jumping around the fretboard unnecessarily (e.g., eliminate horizontal string movements by using more efficient vertical, across-string movements).

🎸 Power Chords Dominate in Rock and Metal

Rock guitarist playing an ESP

Another message from the Cournut et al. results is that, among 2- and 3-string chords, “5” chords (root + fifth) and simple fourths were heavily favored, especially in distorted music genres like:

• Metal (82%)

• Rock (67%)

So, why skip the third? Well, thirds are arguably the best harmony notes, and too much harmonic complexity can muddy the sound when distortion is applied (using amp overdrive or pedals). The fifth brings punch without clutter, providing a thick texture to distorted rock and metal music. The message here is that if you want to sound rockin' on guitar, or if you are considering writing heavily distorted guitar parts for a song, then you should try incorporating 2- or 3-string chords.

While the Cournut paper mentions several partial chord types in reference to the above finding, I would like to also point out that metal music seeks not just heavy sounds, but also dissonant sounds (harsh sounding, conflicting intervals). A very unpleasant interval sometimes used in metal, as well as jazz, is the tritone, or "flat five." I recommend also practicing this interval on different string pairs and learning to incorporate its sound where it feels right to you.

First, once you know this interval, try to see if you can identify it by ear in recorded music (e.g., with famous songs including "Maria" - West Side Story, "Black Sabbath" - Black Sabbath, "Purple Haze" - Jimmy Hendrix, and The Simpsons theme song). Then learn to play the parts of these songs with it. Then make it your own!

🎼 Classical Music Plays by Different Rules

If you’re a classical guitarist, you’ll be happy to hear this: thirds and sixths rule the day in the classical corpus (i.e., the collection of musical data representing the genre's repertoire). These intervals bring warmth and melodic contour—perfect for counterpoint and voicing-rich arrangements involved in playing beautiful classical music from various periods. As noted in the Cournut et al. paper, thirds and sixths are likely to be doubled or flatted on classical guitar [although, technically, sixths were only more common than fifths in the studied classical tabs when natural and accidental notes (6 and ♭6) were combined].

This finding makes total sense, given thirds and sixths provide pleasant, satisfying sounds. However, Cournut et al. had a large "other" note frequency in their classical results, and I would be willing to bet that the "other" notes they found were all or substantially 9ths (an interval that was not plotted on their charts at all)!

🎼 G/B String Oddities

According to Cournut et al., their results confirmed "that guitarists perform unusual gestures around the G/B pair (compared to other adjacent pairs of strings), due to the interval of major third (compared to the perfect fourth between other adjacent pairs of strings)."

Translation: the guitar is tuned in fourths except for the transition from the open G (3rd string) to the open B (2nd string), which is a major third. Due to this, guitarists use variable fingerings across these strings, employing various fret shifts up or down to hit the desired next note. This is something for all of us to be aware of and to actively plan for while seeking the most efficient passages in our playing.

🔍 Four Practical Takeaways

To wrap up, here are some practical takeaways demonstrating actions you can take to apply these lessons to your guitar playing and practice routine:

1. Learn the shapes of A, E, D, and C major/minor chords and how to move them (barre-style) up the neck. These are very common in guitar music, so you'll need them!

2. Spend more time at frets 5–7 and 10–12. That’s where a lot of iconic solos and riffs live. So, it would be efficient to practice these, and you should become very familiar with the minor and major pentatonic patterns in these areas of the fretboard.

3. Explore the G/B string pair carefully—although not discussed much in this article, the study also found that unusual fingerings arise due to the major third interval formed by these strings. Give special attention to playing across these strings.

4. Practice omitting strings! Although you learn full chords as a beginner, it is very common to omit strings when writing or playing guitar music, especially the high "E" string, so it's okay if you accidentally mute this string. Indeed, it is often not played during rhythm guitar parts.

Ultimately, if you're serious about getting better at fretboard fluency, this study is gold because it quantifies the notes, chords, chord shapes, and hand positions where most guitar music is played, including lead guitar, and does so across musical genres. Want to learn how to apply these insights to your playing? Join me for in-person or online guitar lessons—and I’ll help you turn theory into sound.

Let’s get you playing smarter, not harder. 🎶

~JB

References

Cournut, J., Bigo, L., Giraud, M., Martin, N., & David Régnier, D. (2021). What are the most used guitar positions? International Conference on Digital Libraries for Musicology (DLfM 2021), 2021, Online, United Kingdom, pp. 84-92. DOI: ff10.1145/3469013.3469024ff. [link]

Wiederhorn, J. (2025) The Devil's Chord: the history of 'Diabolus in Musica'. Online article, Fender Musical Instruments Corporation, [link]