Guitar Chord Finder

How to read a chord box

The six vertical lines are the strings, low E on the left, high e on the right. The horizontal lines are frets, and the thick bar across the top is the nut. A filled dot is a finger. A hollow circle above the nut means play that string open, and an x means mute it or skip it.

When a shape sits higher up the neck, the box stops drawing the nut and prints a fret number on the left instead, so 5fr means the top line you are looking at is the fifth fret. A long filled bar across several strings is a barre: one finger, usually the index, lying flat across all of them.

Why the same chord has six shapes

A chord is a set of notes, not a set of fingers. C major is C, E and G, and there are dozens of places on the neck where those three notes fall under one hand. Which one you want depends on what came before it, what comes after it, and whether you need the low C in the bass or just the top three strings ringing over a bass player.

That is also why the shapes here are generated rather than copied from a library. The tool walks every four-fret window on the neck, keeps the fingerings that a hand can actually form, checks that the important chord tones are all present, then ranks what survives. A plain triad has to be complete. From four notes up, the perfect fifth is allowed to drop out, because that is the note real players drop first.