There is no chord dictionary. For every position on the neck the search finds the fret combinations that sound only the chord’s notes, put the root in the bass, and a hand can reach.
A finger across a fret stops every string it spans, so a shape wanting an open string underneath the barre is not awkward, it is impossible.
It raises every open string by the same amount, so shapes stay in your hand and sounds move. Fret numbers are counted from the capo.
Change the tuning and the search simply runs against a different set of six numbers. Nothing was rewritten for DADGAD.
The neck runs headstock on the left, body on the right, with the thick low string along the bottom: the same way round as tablature, and as a guitar lying on a table facing you. Frets crowd together as they climb because each sits at the point that shortens the string by one more twelfth-root-of-two.
C major is C, E and G in any order, any octave, on any instrument. Which finger, which fret, which string is a consequence of the tuning, and changes the moment the tuning does. That is why this page searches instead of storing.
Press a string at the fifth fret and the length behind your finger is dead, clamped against the fret. The part that vibrates runs from your finger to the bridge, and it is shorter, which is the whole reason the note is higher. The animation shows where the moving part starts.
The generator first preferred 103211 to the F barre chord, because it needs one finger fewer and leaves the A string open. But a barre presses every string it spans, so that open A cannot exist: modelling the barre as a physical object, not a discount on the finger count, fixed it. The ukulele caught a second assumption: skipping the bottom strings is free on a guitar and false on a soprano ukulele, whose G string is its second highest. Stated properly, a muted string is free only when it sits below everything you are playing. A rule that fixes one instrument without disturbing the other is usually the real rule.
Tune to open G and one finger across a fret gives a major chord anywhere on the neck. The price is everything else: minor chords, sevenths and anything chromatic become awkward, and in some tunings a chord has no comfortable voicing at all. The search shows that plainly.
Because the easiest shape is rarely the right one. A chord played at the fifth fret has a different weight to the same chord at the nut, the fingering that follows from the chord before it saves a scramble, and some voicings leave a finger free for a melody note. The list is ordered by how easy the shape is, not by how good it sounds.
A capo raises every open string by the number of frets it sits at, which is the same as playing a different instrument. Set one and the shapes are recomputed against that instrument, with the fret numbers counted from the capo — so the shape shown is the shape your hand makes. That is why a guitarist with a capo at 3 plays a "D shape" and everyone hears an F.
Because the strings are different notes, so every shape that produced those pitches has moved. Nothing was rewritten for DADGAD — the search simply ran against a different set of six numbers, which is the whole reason for generating shapes rather than storing them.
It separates the strings in time, up to a full second apart. At that speed you can hear each note arrive and place it against the diagram, which is how you learn to tell whether a chord is ringing properly or whether one string is buzzing, muted by a finger, or out of tune. At the other end of the slider everything sounds at once, which is a chord rather than a strum.
No. Each string is a Karplus–Strong pluck — a burst of noise fed round a delay line the length of one period, which is a startlingly good imitation of a plucked string for four lines of code, and audibly not a recording. It is there to let you check which notes you have, not to sound pretty.
Releases in which this page changed, newest last. Derived from the archived copy of every release, not from notes written afterwards — so it reflects what actually shipped. Site-wide passes are left out; they are in the full changelog.