This is your guitar fretboard. If this doesn't look familiar to you, then you need to stop living under a rock and go buy a guitar.
The neck of a guitar is the entire wooden piece on which the fretboard resides. On the fretboard, are frets. You can think of these as the rectangular "tiles" that span across the fretboard. When somebody says to play the 5th fret of a string, it means to count up five frets, towards the body of the guitar.
A standard guitar usually has 12-14 frets. When we say a guitar is a 12-fret guitar, we are referring to the position where the neck meets the guitar body, and not the total number of frets. With the llama guitar above, you can see that this is a 12-fret guitar because the 12th fret meets the body, even though there are more frets after.
Your fretboard has dots on them. The purpose of these are just markers so you can easily find which number fret you're using. Dots are usually on odd numbered frets (3, 5, 7, 9, 12, 15...), with the exception of the 12th fret, which also usually has two dots on it.
A standard guitar has 6 strings. We can refer to these strings by the numbers 1 to 6, where the 6th string is the thickest string and the 1st string is the thinnest string.
The nut is the white piece which precedes all the frets on the fretboard. We can also think of the nut as the "0th" fret (playing the strings but pressing none of the frets). Another equivalent phrase you'll hear is "playing an 'open' string."
The notes of your open guitar strings are as follows:
Guitar tablatures or tabs are the simplest way to write out what to play on a guitar. They aren't really formal musical notation, but are commonly used by guitarists because of its simplicity.
Here is an example of a guitar tab for the first few notes of the Super Mario Bros theme song:
e|--0-0-0---0-3-----| B|--------1---------| G|---------------0--| D|------------------| A|------------------| E|------------------|
As you can see, guitar tabs are basically a text-representation of the fretboard, rotated, as if the guitar were in front of you. Notes are read from left to right. In this tab we play the high "e" open string 3 times, then the 1st fret of the "B" string once, the high "e" open string once, the 3rd fret of the high "e" string once, and then the open string of the "G" string.
One caveat from reading guitar tabs is that you can't tell what the rhythm is (how long to play a note, if there are any pauses, etc). We can only figure this out by listening to the song or with actual formal musical notation.
Next lesson we'll talk about the chromatic scale and make sense of all these notes/alphabet letters that seem so arbitrary.
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