Guitar Chord Library

How to Read a Chord Diagram

A chord diagram is the fretboard seen head-on, as though the guitar were stood upright facing you. That means the layout is not what you see looking down at your own hands, which trips up almost everyone at first.

• Vertical lines are strings. Left to right they run from string 6 (the thickest, low E) to string 1 (the thinnest, high E).
• Horizontal lines are frets. The thick bar at the top is the nut. If there is a number beside the diagram instead, the shape sits that far up the neck.
• Dots are fingers. Place a fingertip there, just behind the fret wire rather than on top of it.
• A bar across several strings is a barre — one finger, usually the index, flattened across all of them.
• ○ above a string means play it open. Do not fret it, but do strike it.
• ✕ above a string means do not play it. Either avoid it when strumming or mute it with a spare finger.

What Makes a Chord Major or Minor

Nearly every chord is built by stacking a root, a third, and a fifth. The root gives the chord its name. The fifth is stable and mostly just adds weight. The thirdis the note that decides the chord's character.

A third four semitones above the root gives a major chord — bright and settled. Lower that one single semitone, to three above the root, and you have a minor chord: darker, sadder. That is the entire difference. C major is C-E-G; C minor is C-E♭-G. One note, moved one fret.

Everything else in this library is a variation on that idea. Add a flattened seventh and you get a dominant 7th, the restless sound of the blues. Use a natural seventh instead for a major 7th, which is lush and jazzy. Remove the third entirely and replace it with a second or a fourth and you get a suspended chord that is neither major nor minor. Take the third away altogether, leaving root and fifth, and you have a power chord — which is exactly why power chords survive heavy distortion where full chords turn to mud.

Why the Same Chord Has Several Shapes

A chord is a set of notes, not a set of finger positions. Any fingering that sounds those notes is that chord, and the guitar offers many. C major is C, E, and G — and you can find those three notes in a dozen places on the neck.

The shapes differ in useful ways. Open positions let strings ring and generally sound fuller and brighter, which is why they dominate acoustic playing. Barre shapes are movable: learn one and you have all twelve roots, because sliding the shape up a fret raises the chord a semitone. And a voicing high on the neck sits in a different register, which matters when you are playing alongside someone else and do not want to occupy the same space.

Movable shapes are the shortcut worth taking

The barre shapes in this library are derived from open chords. The E-shape barre is the open E chord with the nut replaced by your index finger; the A-shape barre is the open A chord treated the same way. Once you can play those two comfortably, you can play every major chord in every key, because you already know where the notes are on strings 6 and 5.

This is why learning the notes along the low E and A strings pays off faster than memorising more shapes. Two shapes plus a fretboard map beats twelve memorised chords.

Getting Barre Chords to Sound

Barre chords defeat most beginners, and it is almost never a strength problem — squeezing harder is the usual instinct and the usual mistake.

• Roll your index finger slightly onto its side, toward the headstock. The edge is harder and flatter than the soft centre of the pad, and it will not swallow strings in the creases between joints.
• Position the barre close behind the fret, not midway between frets. The closer you are, the less pressure the string needs.
• Let your thumb sit behind the neck, roughly opposite your middle finger, rather than hooking over the top.
• Pull back gently with your arm rather than pinching with the hand. Larger muscles tire far more slowly.
• Check your setup. If the action is high or the strings are heavy, barre chords are genuinely harder — this is not always your technique. A guitar set up well is much easier to learn on.

Test one string at a time. The strings that fail are usually 2 and 3, where the barre crosses a finger joint. Shift the finger a millimetre or two until they ring.

A Note on How These Diagrams Were Made

Chord charts on the web are frequently wrong, usually because they were copied by hand. The shapes here are generated instead: barre forms are transposed programmatically from a small set of movable shapes, open positions are entered individually, and then every single voicing is checked by computing the notes the fingering actually sounds and comparing them against the chord's formula. Anything that does not match is dropped rather than published.

That check runs over all 156 chords and 281 voicings. It caught real errors while this library was being built.

Tune Before You Practise

A correct chord shape on an out-of-tune guitar still sounds wrong, and beginners routinely conclude their fingers are at fault when the tuning is. Check your tuning before a practice session with our free chromatic tuner, and if you are working on timing as well, the online metronome pairs well with chord-change drills.