Guitar chords and piano chords

Three ways to arrive at a chord

Anyone looking for a chord arrives by one of only three routes, and it is worth knowing which one you are in. The first is by name: you have a chart in front of you that says Bm7, and you need to know where to put your fingers. The second is the reverse — you have the notes, from a score or from keys you are holding down, and you need the name. The third is by ear: a song is playing and you want the sequence behind it.

The first two are lookups and this catalogue answers them directly. The third is a different kind of problem, because a recording does not hand you separate notes; it hands you a wall of sound with the chord buried in it. That one is answered further down the page.

Knowing which of the three you are in saves time. Searching by name when you actually have notes in front of you means guessing at spellings until one of them lands, and the same set of notes can carry several different names.

How to read a chord chart

A guitar chord chart is a picture of the fretboard seen head-on, with the headstock at the top. The six vertical lines are strings, low E on the left; the horizontal lines are frets. A dot on a line means press that string at that fret. Above the diagram, an O marks a string played open and an X marks one that is not played at all — the X is the mark most often ignored by beginners, and ignoring it is what makes a clean grip sound muddy. Numbers inside the dots, when present, are fingers: 1 is the index, 4 the little finger.

A piano chord chart is a drawing of a stretch of keyboard with the keys to press marked. It carries less information than the guitar version because a piano has one key per pitch, while a guitar has the same pitch in several places, and choosing between them is half the craft of playing.

The two charts answer different questions, which is why this catalogue shows both for every chord: guitar chords as grips, piano chords as notes. The guitar chart tells you a grip. The piano chart tells you the notes. A guitarist who only ever reads grips can play hundreds of songs and still not know what is inside the chord — and the moment a chart calls for something without a stock shape, there is nothing to fall back on.

Which guitar chords to learn first

The question behind most first visits is not what a chord is but which guitar chords are worth the first week. The working answer is six: E minor, A minor, D major, G major, C major and E major. Between them they cover a large share of songs in the keys guitarists actually play, and every one of them is fingered inside the first three frets with nothing barred.

F major is the wall, and it is worth knowing why rather than treating it as a test of willpower. It has no open-string shape, so the standard fingering lays one finger flat across all six strings while the other three build a chord on top of it. Most people who stop learning guitar stop here. The way through is not more grip strength but the three-string version — the top half of the shape, which is harmonically complete enough to carry a song while the hand catches up over the following weeks.

The starting set for piano chords is different, because a keyboard asks nothing of grip strength and has no barre: C, F and G major are learned in an afternoon, since each is three white keys with the same spacing. The difficulty arrives later and elsewhere — at the point where the left hand has to hold time and voicing while the right hand plays a melody.

Finding a chord from its notes

The reverse lookup — notes in, name out — has one property that surprises people: the answer is not unique. C, E, G and A together are a C major sixth. They are also an A minor seventh. Nothing in the four notes decides between the two names; what decides is which note the bass is playing and where the chord is going next.

This is not a flaw in the naming system. A chord name is a claim about function, not just about pitch content, and two claims can be made about the same handful of notes. Software that answers such a question with a single name and no alternatives is hiding the interesting part.

The practical rule: identify the lowest note first, then read the rest as distances above it. If that reading produces a name you recognise, you are probably right. If it produces something exotic, try treating a different note as the root and see whether the shape becomes ordinary.

Eight groups and what separates them

The groups below are not arbitrary shelving. Each one is defined by a structural fact — how many notes the chord has, what intervals stack up inside it, or which note has been replaced by another.

Triads are the three-note foundation and there are exactly four of them. Seventh chords add one more note and are the working vocabulary of jazz, soul and most film music. Extended chords keep stacking past the seventh into ninths, elevenths and thirteenths. Suspended chords remove the third — the note that makes a chord major or minor — and put a neighbour in its place, which is why they sound unresolved. Add chords bring in an extra note without the stack underneath it. Altered chords sharpen or flatten a note deliberately to create tension. Power chords drop to two notes and gain volume by losing the third. Quartal chords abandon stacked thirds altogether and build from fourths.

The comparison table below gives the size of each group and its defining trait, and each name leads to a page covering that group in depth.

Chords inside a recording

Pulling chords out of audio is the third question, and it is much harder than either lookup, because the information you need has been mixed together. A guitar strum, a bass note and a vocal all arrive as one signal, and the chord has to be reconstructed from the overtones of everything at once.

Doing it by ear is a genuine skill and a slow one to build. The usual shortcut — searching for a chord sheet someone else typed out — works for famous songs and fails for everything else, and the sheets that do exist are often wrong in exactly the places that matter, because whoever wrote them simplified a chord they could not name.

This is where the studio side of the site does something the catalogue cannot. You give it audio or a MIDI file, and it separates the notes, works out the harmony behind them, and writes the chords over the score — including the ones nobody would think to look up.

Playing chords and melody together

A common next question, on both instruments, is how to hold a melody and its chords at the same time. On piano the standard division is chords in the left hand and melody in the right, and the difficulty is that the left hand must stay quiet enough not to bury the tune.

On guitar the same idea is called chord melody, and it is harder, because both jobs land on one set of six strings. The usual method is to put the melody note on a high string, keep only the essential notes of the chord underneath it, and let the rest go. This is where the groups above start to matter: knowing that a seventh chord survives losing its fifth, but not its third or seventh, is what lets you thin a grip down to something playable.

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