Back

What Is a Unison?

What Is a Unison?

A unison is two notes of exactly the same pitch sounding together — an interval of zero half steps. It sounds trivial ("the same note, twice?") but on guitar it's a real, physical thing, because the same pitch lives in several places on the neck.

Unisons on the fretboard

The 5th fret of most strings equals the next open string — E-string 5th fret is A, the same pitch as the open A string. (The exception, as always, is the B string: the G string's 4th fret matches open B.) That's the basis of the 5th-fret tuning method: play the fretted note and the open string together and tune until the "beating" between them stops and they merge into one sound.

Twelve-string guitars and unison bends in lead playing (bend one string up until it matches a fretted note on the next string) both trade on the thick, chorus-like sound of two strings on one pitch.

Why the concept matters

Recognizing "same pitch, different string" is half of fretboard fluency — it's how you see that the neck isn't 72 different notes but the same 12 notes repeated in overlapping layers.

Back to top