Guitar Blank Chord Chart

You’ll note this is a blank chord chart widget where you can experiment with shapes on-screen. Simply tap or click the grid with your mouse to start interacting (or use your computer keyboard if you prefer faster movement). It’s made to be as intuitive as possible so you can starting playing around with finger positions straight away.

In main area, this is represented as a grid of a guitar neck with five rows (the first five frets) running horizontally and six columns (strings) running vertically above the nut line. Each string has a little circle at the base where you can turn that string on or off (i.e., mute it completly). You then just click in any square on the grid to place your finger on that fret. This will show as a dot with the note written into the square, click it again to take your finger away and return the string to how it was.

How to Use the Guitar Chord Chart

While you can use your computer keyboard to navigate the chart without a mouse, you can also interact with the grid and buttons by clicking or tapping with your mouse. To jump from button to button and cell to cell on the page simply press the Tab key. Then when you have a cell highlighted, hit either the Space bar or Enter key to turn that finger position on or off. This is useful if you want to keep both hands on keyboard as you run through variations of chords.

Once you have your fingers in place, it will then reads the notes for you, working out what chord they are. It displays the likely name of the chord underneath the chart alongside the notes that make up the chord. This allows you to get an idea off the shapes that produce the more familiar chords and how changing one finger can change quality of that sound.

The control area includes a Play button, which when pressed will cause all of the active strings to be strummed and played back for you to hear how it sounds. It also shows you instantly whether the sound is ringing clear or clashing. If no notes are active (all strings muted), then pressing play will not result in any sound until you include one or more note with fingers fretted or string plucked. Clear resets the whole chart and all strings return to the open position. This could of come in handy when you are creating a new shape but don’t wish to delete each dot individually.

Volume Slider. On the right-hand side, there is a volume slider that controls the loudness of the audio output. Raise if you feel the tone needs to stand out more or turn down if practicing in the background. There’s even a set of help buttons in case you’ve forgotten how it all works, or just want some extra screen space.

A Fullscreen button will take the widget and make it completely full size in your browser window, which can come in handy if you’re working on small screens and you’re finding the details difficult to see. The How to Play button will display a help panel with a rundown of all the ways to interact with the fretboard.

The advantage of this is that you then have something to experiment with: place your fingers to form major or minor chords you are familiar with, and hear difference in sound. Use the circles on top of the nut to block certain strings so you can just play simple textures and isolated partial voicings. Then move it up one fret at a time until you see how slight changes impacts the harmony.

This chart is useful if you want to try some new chords out that you’ve been thinking about, or you’d like to learn how to stretch fingers up and down the board. It’s an area where you can get away with things without anyone looking over your shoulder. Let the sound guide you and experiment freely in this space, explore the grid at your own pace. Place some dots on the neck today and see what kind of sound you come up with.