Chord charts for guitar, piano and ukulele

Six vertical lines are the strings, horizontal ones the frets; the thick line at the top is the nut. A dot says where a finger goes, a number under it says which finger. A circle above a string means play it open, a cross means do not play it at all — and that cross is the part beginners miss most often.

The ukulele is tuned G–C–E–A, and that changes everything about the shapes: a C major takes one finger, F takes two, and Am is the easiest chord on any instrument. Four chords — C, F, Am, G — already carry hundreds of songs, which is why the ukulele is the fastest way in.

Open chords use loose strings and live in the first three frets — that is where everyone starts. A barre chord replaces the nut with your index finger, and the same shape then works at every fret: learn one, and you have twelve. The hand hurts for a fortnight and then stops.

A capo moves the nut up the neck: put it on the second fret, play the shapes of D, and the song sounds in E. That is how a singer gets a comfortable key without learning new shapes. The same move on paper is transposing — every chord shifts by the same number of semitones.

On stage a phone screen goes dark at the worst moment, so a printed sheet still wins. Pick the chords you need, put them in the order of the song and print — the diagrams come out large enough to read from a music stand.

Each chord has its own page with every voicing in the chord library. To know which chords belong together, start from the key; to read the same chords written on a staff, see music notation.