Standard ukulele tuning is G C E A, and the fourth string is the one that catches people out: it sounds higher than the two strings drawn below it. The G is not a low note. In standard high-G tuning it sits a tone below the top A string, above both the C and the E.
That is called reentrant tuning, and it is the single most common reason a ukulele fretboard diagram is wrong.
Why the diagram is still right
A scale diagram answers one question: is the note under this finger in the scale? That question is about pitch class — whether the note is a G at all — and not about which octave the G lands in. G is G in any octave, so the reentrant string is drawn exactly where the arithmetic says it should be, with no special case anywhere in the engine.
What reentrant tuning does change is what your ear expects. Two things follow from it that a diagram cannot show you:
- The lowest note in a shape is not the lowest row. Play a scale from the bottom row upward and it will not come out in ascending order. If you want an ascending run, start on the C string.
- Chord voicings sit closer together than they look. All four strings live inside about an octave and a half, which is most of where the ukulele’s bright, compact sound comes from.
Notice that the fourth string is drawn thin here, the same weight as the top A. That is deliberate — drawing it thick would imply a bass note that is not there.
If your ukulele is strung low-G, the notes on the diagram are all still correct, and the ascending-order caveat above simply goes away.
What transfers from a guitar
Quite a lot, if you play both. The intervals between G C E A are exactly the intervals between a guitar’s top four strings, D G B E — the ukulele is those four strings moved up a perfect fourth.
In practice: capo a guitar at the fifth fret and play only the top four strings, and you are playing a ukulele. Every shape you know there works here, at the same frets, naming different notes. That is also why a guitarist’s first ukulele chord shapes feel familiar and get called by the wrong names — what you finger as a G shape sounds a C.
Fret count
The neck is drawn with 15 frets, which is a concert-scale instrument. Sopranos often stop at 12 and tenors reach 17 to 19, so count up your own neck and ignore whatever is past the end of it. The markers are at 5, 7, 10, 12 and 15 — note the 10 rather than the 9, which is the visible difference between a ukulele neck and a guitar one.
Where to start
Five notes go a long way here. The minor pentatonic page explains the scale on guitar, but the degrees are the same on any instrument — read it there, then switch this page’s instrument selector back to the ukulele and work one position at a time.