**Overview** We could take a music theory class to understand *what* a note is, but why don't we just find out for ourselves? In this data set we have the notes on a guitar on open strings, and on the 1st-8th frets on every string. The notes were recorded on a nice but low-end guitar called the Yamaha C-40. The guitar is in standard tuning (from the top string to the bottom on we have E low, A, D, G, B, E high). **What to do with this dataset** I didn't label any notes (except the open ones - an open A string is an A). If you want a challenge you can cluster the notes and see if your clustering lumps all the same notes together. If you want labels so you can do some inspection of notes that are the same you can look on google for a guitar fretboard diagram. I have done both of these experiments and learned a bit about music which I 'm hoping to verify soon when I find a good music theory book. This data set might be interesting to use to be able to write sheet music from an audio sample of some finger-picked music. Identifying chords is a difficult computational task, but finger-style guitar, with clear, individual notes, might be easier. If this is the case, a simple script could be written to write sheet music from an audio sample. One draw back about the data set is that some non-plucked strings were vibrating when I played a note. I tried various techniques to muffle them, but there is still some noise in the background. I don't know if this is because of my technique or something that happens to all players on all guitars. In any event, this noise didn't hurt my analysis. **About the data** They were recorded by me, Melvyn, using a program called audacity. There is a directory with the name of the string. Inside the directory you will find .wav files named either open, 1, 2, ....8 for the fingering of the string. There is also a directory called "scale" I recorded some notes that make a "do-re-mi..." scale. You can use these for a number of things. I use the GuitarTuner app to tune the Guitar - I'm just learning so I don't have an ear for notes yet. After some initial analysis it looks like the guitar might be a bit out of tune, so the resonant frequencies are a bit off from what they should be. Another thing that is interesting to think about it is how far a frequency must be from the proper on until it becomes distinguishable as a different note.