A four-string bass in standard tuning is E A D G — the guitar’s bottom four strings, an octave down. The notes are in the same places relative to each other, which means every interval shape you may already know from a guitar neck transfers directly. What does not transfer is the fingering: the frets are further apart and there are two fewer strings to reach for, so patterns that worked across six strings have to be rebuilt across four.
Every gap is a fourth
This is the part worth internalising, and it is easier on bass than on guitar: all three string gaps are a perfect fourth. There is no G-to-B major third to break the pattern. A shape is therefore the same shape on every pair of adjacent strings, at every point on the neck, with no exceptions to memorise.
Two consequences you can use immediately:
- The same note is five frets up on the string below. Fret 5 of the E string is the open A. That is how the neck folds, and it is why a two-octave scale usually fits inside four frets and two strings.
- An octave is two strings across and two frets up. Put your first finger on any note and your third or fourth finger two strings up and two frets along — that is the octave, everywhere, always.
Why there is no position selector here
The guitar pages have a CAGED control and this one does not. That is deliberate.
CAGED is built on standard six-string tuning’s specific interval pattern — five open chord shapes that happen to tile the neck. A bass has four strings, tuned in straight fourths, and it is not usually playing chords at all. Transplanting CAGED onto it would be inventing a system rather than describing one.
Bassists think in position boxes instead: pick a fret to anchor the first finger, and play everything reachable without shifting. The diagram supports that directly — set the fret range to the four or five frets your hand actually covers, and you get exactly the notes available from that position and nothing else.
Fret count
The neck here is drawn with 24 frets, which is the modern spec. Plenty of instruments — a Precision, a Jazz, most older basses — stop at 20, and if yours does, simply ignore the top of the diagram. Drawing 20 by default would be the worse mistake, because it would hide notes that players on 24-fret instruments genuinely have.
Start with five notes
The minor pentatonic page is written for guitar, but the scale itself is the same five degrees on any instrument, and it is where most bass lines live. Read it for the theory, then come back here and set the range to one position at a time.