Navigation: [ Home Page] [ Guitars & Music ] [ Guitar Tab ] [ Music and Guitar FAQs ]

Howard's Big List of Guitar Chords

Chord shapes are available below in all 12 keys.

To view the chord shapes, first click on the root note of the chord you want to find.

Choose the root note:

NB: all chromatic notes are listed as sharps, e.g Bb chords are listed as A# chords

Need some help with this guitar chord dictionary?

See below for information about this list of guitar chords and the chord generator program that was used to generate the chords.

A Better List of Guitar Chords?

The guitar chords listed on these pages were created automatically by a program I have been working on for several years. The idea is to generate all possible ways of playing a particular chord, and to list the possible chord shapes in a sensible way - e.g easiest and most useful chords first.

Fingers and thumbs

All chord shapes that are listed should be playable - i.e they don't require you to have more than four fingers! Many other chord dictionary sites and programs that I have seen fail in this regard as they often produce chords that can only be played if you have 5 or more fingers. With the chord generator I have designed, I have done my best to make sure only playable chords are displayed.

The program does not currently make use of the thumb for calculating chord fingerings. This means that shapes such as 133210 for Fmaj7 will not be listed as they can only be played using four fingers and a thumb. I hope to add the "thumb option" soon.

Chord types

The input to the program is a list of chord types (major, minor, m7, maj7, sus4 etc). A list of chords is then generated for each type and for each of the 12 semitones (A, A#, B... etc). Many different shapes are created for each chord - usually at least 20 or 30 shapes.

For each chord the different shapes are divided into three groups: barre chord shapes, other moveable shapes, and shapes using open strings. If you're looking at chord shapes for Am9 for example, then any of those listed in the "barre" or "other moveable shapes" groups can be moved up and down the neck and used as shapes for Bbm9, Bm9, Gm9 etc.

74 different chord types were used to generate these chords.

How many chords?

The total number of guitar chords listed on these pages is a little over 42,000. This is a genuine number - not a fanciful estimate based on unsound maths as I have seen elsewhere. Also, as mentioned above, this number does not include chord shapes that are physically impossible to play. Some chords will be harder to play than others (the easiest ones are displayed first) - but all those listed should be realistically playable shapes.

Last updated May 2006