About
Chords should be
free and fast
Open Guitar Chords was built because looking up guitar chords online had become a chore: autoplay videos, cookie walls, paywalled diagrams and pages that take five seconds to load a single chord chart. The chords themselves are public knowledge — nobody should have to fight a website to read them.
- 166
- chord shapes
- 65
- in-depth chord pages
- 80
- song sheets
- 14
- browser tools
What you'll find here
Chords
166 chord shapes — every root in major, minor, seventh, suspended, sixth, diminished, augmented and power forms, each with a fingering diagram, note spelling and audio.
65 in-depth chord pages — for the chords people actually play, with step-by-step fingering, every position up the neck, and the songs in our library that use them. Rarer shapes are grouped into 8 family pages so every root can still be compared side by side.
All chords →Songs
Song sheets — key, capo, difficulty, section-by-section progressions and strumming, with every chord diagram linked inline.
All songs →Guides
Plain-English guides — basic chords, power chords, barre chords and how to read diagrams.
Guides →Tools
14 free browser tools with no install and no account: an
How the chord data is built
Every diagram on this site comes from a single chord database: fingerings are defined once as string-and-fret data, and the diagrams, note spellings and theory notes are generated from that source — so a diagram and its notes can never disagree with each other.
Generated, not drawn by hand. This C major diagram, the note spelling that sits beside it on its chord page, and the audio you hear when you tap it all come from the same entry in the database — which is why they cannot drift apart.
Where the content comes from
- 01
No page on this site is written to a template and padded out. Every chord page has three things that are specific to that chord: the fingering for each position, the notes it contains, and — the part that cannot be copied — a count of where it appears in the 80 song sheets in this library, what chord it moves to next, and the progressions it sits inside. Those numbers are counted from the sheets in our song library at build time, so they change when the library changes and they describe real songs rather than a theory rule.
- 02
Chord fingerings are stored once as string-and-fret data, which means the diagram, the notes and the audio can never disagree with each other. The guitar audio is played from real acoustic guitar samples (University of Iowa Musical Instrument Samples, via the tonejs-instruments project), pitch-shifted per string — a synthesiser fallback covers the case where the samples have not loaded yet.
- 03
Where a chord has no song in our library yet, the page says so instead of inventing an example. If you spot something that is wrong, the chord data is in one file and the corrections end up everywhere at once.
Who makes this site
Chiye is the guitarist and developer behind Open Guitar Chords. A self-taught player, he designs the chord database, renders the audio engine and writes every guide himself — from the beginner’s seat he still remembers: buzzing barres, muted thirds and changes that arrive half a beat late. Because one person builds the data, the diagrams and the explanations, a fingering and its description can never disagree.
Every chord page carries his byline and a revision date, and the chord database he maintains is the single source behind the diagrams, the audio, the printed cards and the practice tools — when a fingering is corrected, everything on the site updates at once.
How the site is made
Static pages generated at build time, minimal JavaScript, self-hosted fonts. Most pages load in under half a second on a mid-range phone, and every song sheet prints cleanly for your music stand.
Guitar sound credits
Chord playback uses real acoustic guitar recordings from the University of Iowa Musical Instrument Samples (via the tonejs-instruments project), pitch-shifted per fret in your browser — no synthesized beeps.
About the song sheets
Song pages contain chord progressions, structure and technique notes — not lyrics. If you need full lyrics, please support the artists through official sources. Chords and progressions are editorial references, and we welcome corrections at any time.