About Chord Fingering

Chord Fingering is a free library of guitar and piano chord diagrams with fingerings, notes and audio.

Who builds it

Chord Fingering is an independent site built and maintained by one person. It has no accounts, no app to install and no paywall.

Where the fingerings come from

The guitar fingerings (frets, finger numbers, barres) come from chords-db, an open chord database published under the MIT licence. The notes, intervals and formulas on each page are computed from the chord symbol with the open-source tonal music theory library. Diagrams, PNGs and PDFs are drawn by this site's own renderer from that data.

How the fingerings are checked

Before a page is built, every fingering is checked by computing the note each string sounds and comparing the result with the chord's formula. A fingering is dropped if it sounds a note that is not in the chord, or if it leaves out a note that defines the chord (the fifth may be omitted, as is normal on guitar). In the current build 105 fingerings from the source data failed that check and are not published; 470 fingerings across 120 chords passed.

Difficulty ratings are computed from each shape: the number of fingers, the fret span, whether there is a barre and whether a string in the middle has to be muted. The "how to play" text for the most common chords is written by hand; for the rest it is generated from the fingering itself.

If you find a diagram you think is wrong, the fingering shown in text on the page (for example x32010) is the fastest way to describe it.

Using the diagrams

The PNG and PDF files are free to print and to use in lessons and handouts. A link back to the chord page is appreciated.