Guitar Chords

Guitar is the instrument StrumAndKey's chord vocabulary is widest on: 21 distinct chord qualities across all 12 keys, 252 pages in total. That width exists because a 6-string, standard-tuned guitar can physically voice things a piano right hand or a 4-string ukulele can't reach without real compromise — a full 13th chord, for instance, needs six different pitch classes stacked across a fifth-plus range, and six strings happen to be exactly enough to get most of them without leaving anything essential out.

The starting point for every guitar chord shape is standard tuning: low to high, E-A-D-G-B-E. Read that interval by interval and it's four perfect 4ths (E to A, A to D, D to G, G to B) and one major 3rd (B to E) — the guitar isn't tuned in a single repeating interval, and that one broken symmetry is the real reason chord shapes don't just slide uniformly across string sets the way they would on an all-4ths instrument like a bass or a 5-string banjo in some tunings. A shape built across strings 4-3-2 (D-G-B) has to be adjusted, not just copy-pasted, when you move it to strings 6-5-4 (E-A-D), because the 3rd-interval break sits between strings 3 and 2. This is a real, physical fact about the instrument, not trivia — it's why guitarists learn chord shapes as families (CAGED, barre-shape sets) rather than one universal movable pattern.

Open-position chords — the ones that use unfretted strings ringing alongside fretted notes — exist because of where standard tuning's open strings happen to fall relative to common keys. C, G, D, A, and E all have comfortable open-position major shapes because their fretting patterns line up with low frets near the nut; F, by contrast, has no comfortable open shape in standard tuning at all, which is the actual reason F is the chord most beginner method books delay teaching until after a student has some finger strength — not an arbitrary pedagogical choice, but a direct consequence of the tuning.

Barre chords solve the "no open shape" problem generally: by laying the index finger flat across all six strings at a given fret, a guitarist creates a movable capo of sorts and can then finger the rest of an open-shape pattern relative to it, transposing that shape to any of the 12 keys. That's why, once barre technique is solid, a player effectively has access to every open-position major/minor/7th shape at every root — the barre is the bridge between "the 5 or 6 open shapes everyone learns first" and "all 12 keys."

Extended and altered qualities —9ths, 11ths, 13ths, add9, sus2/sus4, diminished/augmented families, half-diminished m7b5 — round out the 21-quality roster here specifically because guitar voicing conventions genuinely support all of them in practice, unlike ukulele's compact 10-quality working set. Jazz and R&B guitarists lean on maj7, m7, 9, and 13 chords for smoother harmonic color; blues and rock lean on dominant 7 and the power-chord family (5, guitar-only, since a power chord's ambiguous major/minor quality is what makes it survive heavy distortion without turning muddy); folk and pop lean on sus2/sus4 for the suspended, unresolved character that a plain major or minor chord doesn't have.

The CAGED system is the practical framework most guitar teachers use to organize this hub's 252 pages into something learnable rather than 252 unrelated shapes to memorize one at a time. It observes that every major chord shape on the neck is a movable version of one of just five open-position shapes — C, A, G, E, and D — and that these five shapes overlap and connect up the fretboard in a repeating cycle. Learn the five CAGED shapes for major, and their minor and 7th equivalents, and you effectively have a map for locating any chord in any key anywhere on the neck, rather than needing a separate memorized fingering for each of the 12 roots. StrumAndKey's individual guitar chord pages note, where relevant, which CAGED shape family a given fingering belongs to.

A capo changes which open shapes are available in which actual sounding key without changing anything about the shapes themselves — clip a capo on the 2nd fret and an open D shape sounds as E, a G shape sounds as A, and so on. That's a genuinely different mechanism from a barre chord (which moves the same finger pattern manually) even though both let a guitarist reach keys that don't have their own comfortable open shape; capos are common in folk, singer-songwriter, and worship guitar playing specifically because they preserve the ringing, easier-to-play open-string quality that a full barre chord physically can't replicate.

String gauge and tuning stability also shape which chords feel comfortable where on the neck: heavier-gauge strings resist bending out of tune under a barre's pressure better than light strings, which is part of why beginners on cheap, light-strung guitars sometimes find barre chords buzz or go sharp until they build hand strength and finger placement precision — a real, physical learning-curve fact, not just "practice more."

The 12-key, 21-quality grid this hub organizes reflects a real asymmetry in how often each cell actually gets used. C, G, D, A, and E major and minor account for a hugely disproportionate share of real guitar playing, precisely because of the open-shape advantage described above; F#, C#, and G# major and minor, by contrast, are comparatively rare in guitar repertoire outside of specific keys chosen to match a singer's vocal range or a horn section's preferred key, and are almost always played as barre or capo-assisted shapes rather than open ones. StrumAndKey documents every cell in the grid with equal factual rigor regardless of real-world frequency, but the individual chord pages are honest about which chords a beginner will actually encounter constantly versus which ones mostly come up when transposing an existing song into an awkward key.

Alternate tunings — drop D, open G, DADGAD, and dozens of others — change this entire hub's fingering logic without changing the underlying chord theory at all. A C major chord is still root-3rd-5th no matter what the six open strings are tuned to; what changes is which physical shape produces those three notes. StrumAndKey's diagrams throughout this hub assume standard EADGBE tuning specifically, which is the correct default for the overwhelming majority of real playing situations, but it's worth knowing that a chord shape isn't a universal law of the instrument — it's a consequence of one particular, extremely common tuning choice.

Nylon-string classical and steel-string acoustic/electric guitars share the identical chord theory and fingering logic covered throughout this hub, since both are normally tuned EADGBE — the difference between them is entirely in string material, tension, and neck width, not in which notes a given chord shape produces. A player switching from one to the other can use every diagram on this site without adjustment.

Every page in this hub states each chord's exact notes and interval makeup, computed at build time from the root and quality rather than hand-typed per page, plus at least one real fingering diagram where a genuinely playable voicing exists, character-and-use prose specific to that chord, and practice guidance. Power chords, the one family unique to guitar among StrumAndKey's three instruments, get their own dedicated section of this roster — see the Power Chords hub for the full 12-key rundown.

Fretting-hand fingering conventions are consistent enough across this hub's 252 pages to be worth stating once here rather than re-explaining on every page: index finger is 1, middle is 2, ring is 3, pinky is 4, and a barre is notated as a single finger (almost always the index) covering multiple strings at once rather than as four separate finger numbers. Where a chord can genuinely be fingered more than one reasonable way — and many can — StrumAndKey's diagrams show the fingering that's most commonly taught and most likely to connect smoothly into the next chord in a typical progression, not necessarily the only valid option.

Muted and skipped strings (shown as an "X" above the string in a diagram, distinct from an open "O" circle) are a real, deliberate part of many guitar chord shapes, not a diagram error or omission — some chord voicings sound cleanest when a specific string is prevented from ringing, either because fretting it accurately would require an extra finger the shape doesn't have to spare, or because that string's open pitch would clash with the chord's intended sound. How to Read a Chord Diagram covers exactly how StrumAndKey represents muted strings and why a shape sometimes deliberately leaves the lowest string unplayed.

Browse the full 252-page roster below by key and quality, or start from a narrower cross-instrument angle: Major Chords, Minor Chords, Seventh Chords, Extended Chords, Suspended Chords, and Diminished & Augmented Chords each pull the matching guitar pages alongside their piano and ukulele counterparts. If you're new to reading the diagrams themselves, How to Read a Chord Diagram walks through every symbol used here — open strings, muted strings, barres, and finger numbers.