Mark RobergeFounder, Artist Strategy, Make Our Music · Your A&R. Without the Gatekeepers.

Guitarist's Insane Secret: Playing Phone Numbers for Chords! #shorts

17 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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0:59

In this short, the speaker recounts a quirky story about a guitarist he once taught. He first showed the guitarist how to play Nirvana’s “Come As You Are,” after which the guitarist delved into more Nirvana material, using drop‑D tuning. To memorize fret positions, the guitarist employed an unusual mnemonic: he would map each fret to the digits of his friends’ phone numbers, literally playing the numbers (e.g., 7‑8‑6‑8) on the fretboard. This allowed him to instantly locate any fret because the phone numbers were already stored in his memory. The speaker finds the method both funny and impressive, noting it’s a unique technique he’s never heard of before.

Chapters

That's what he's always. It's kind of funny, like I always think of this though, but he, like learned how to play. I actually showed him his. I showed him how to play his first song, Guitar. Like, I couldn't play guitar, but I showed him like, come as you are. And then he went from there and just took it. And then by Nirvana. And then one of the things that he used to like learn guitar to like know the frets and just like memorize them. Like the phone book or something he dropped. He would. He dropped, you know, drop D2 tuning and then would just borrow everybody he knew's phone numbers. And he would play the phone number 7868 what? Yeah. And that's how he would know where all the threats were. That's crazy. That's how he did it. Because he had everybody's phone numbers in his head. So he would utilize to remember that he would just play everybody's phone number. And then he knew where 6 was on the front porch. He knew where 9 was. I never have heard this. Yeah, it's a. I. Yeah, it's funny. It's. It was. It's kind of a unique thing because, like, I've never heard anybody else say that story. And I was like, that's funny that he did that. That's crazy, dude.