Free Guitar Chord Charts Online (With Audio)

Melodician gives every chord its own page with an interactive diagram, recorded acoustic guitar audio, and step-by-step finger instructions. Its distinguishing feature is per-string playback: tap the diagram to strum the whole chord, or tap a single string to hear only that note. There is no account, no signup wall and no popups. That one-string-at-a-time control is the fastest way to find out that your third string is muted, which is the single most common reason a beginner's chord sounds wrong.

The other strong idea is the easier shape. On hard chords the page carries a reduced version alongside the standard one and explains what you are giving up, which is usually bass weight rather than the identity of the chord. The F page lays out the four-string F, then points out that the middle, ring and pinky are already in their final positions, so nothing has to be relearned when the full barre starts working. The Bm page does the same. Both list four common shapes, ordered easiest first.

Every page has a left-handed toggle that mirrors the diagram and is remembered by the browser next time. Printing a chord page produces a clean black-and-white chart with the navigation, player and footer left off the paper, which is unusually considerate and rare on sites like this.

The honest caveat is that it is new. Coverage is the common chords rather than an exhaustive database, and it is guitar only for now, with piano, ukulele and bass described as planned. Song listings hand off to a partner site.

FaChords runs both directions at once. Click notes on a fretboard and it names the chord, or use the lookup dropdowns to browse voicings by key, type and position. What sets it apart is configuration: a capo on any fret, multiple tunings including drop D and open tunings, and a left-handed flip. When you move the capo, the tool recalculates note names and chord identification to match, which most free references do not attempt.

It also plays what you select in a loop with a four-beat countdown and an adjustable tempo, with an optional drum pattern behind it, so you can drill a change rather than just look at it. There is microphone pitch detection for identifying notes from a real guitar, a piano keyboard you can click for reference, and the option to download the fretboard as an image or grab an embed code.

If your capo maths is the actual problem rather than the shape, our guitar capo chart covers what key you land in for each fret position.

Chordbook's advantage is its sounds. It carries separately sampled electric and acoustic guitars and lets you choose which one plays, so a jazz voicing can be auditioned clean and electric rather than through a single generic tone. You can set left or right handed, move up the neck, and add a capo. The same sounds drive the diagrams on its information pages, not just the main app.

The MyChords feature is the useful extra: save the chords you have selected or built, play them back as a sequence, and keep the set for your next visit without creating a membership. That turns the reference into a rough scratchpad for a progression you are trying to remember. The site also carries scales and a tuner.

The presentation is showing its age in places, and the site's own copy still describes custom mobile views as in development, so expect the desktop experience to be the better one.

Scales-Chords covers by far the widest ground on this list. Its database holds over 84,000 chords and 500,000 chord charts across guitar, piano, ukulele, mandolin, banjo, bass, violin, viola and cello. You type a chord name in plain text and it parses what you meant, which is faster than working through dropdown menus. For anyone arranging for more than one instrument, a single source for all of them removes a lot of tab switching.

Each chord page is more thorough than the file size suggests. Ask it for Bm7 and you get the notes and interval structure, a note flagged as safe to omit, ten possible fret configurations, inversions, a dedicated left-handed section, related chords and scales, harmonised progressions, and the chord written on a staff. A tuning selector carries fifteen options, including drop D, half and full step down, seven open tunings, all fourths and all fifths.

The reason it sits here rather than at the top is presentation. Shapes are served as pre-rendered chart images rather than an interactive diagram you can play with, so it reads like a reference book: you go there knowing the chord you want, and you leave as soon as you have it. That is a fair trade for the depth, but it is a different experience from the interactive tools above.

JGuitar's chord search draws diagrams for virtually any chord symbol you can write. The feature worth knowing about is batch lookup: enter several chord symbols separated by commas and it returns a diagram for each one, so an entire song's harmony becomes a single printable page rather than eight separate searches. For a player learning an unfamiliar chart, that is a real time saver.

Every shape carries two playback options rather than one, strummed and arpeggiated, and the arpeggiated version is the more useful of the two for checking your fingering, because a rolled chord exposes a dead string that a strum can hide. Coverage is deep: a search for Bm7 returns twenty-seven shapes, paged six at a time.

Note labels are configurable between none, finger numbers, letter names and chord tones, which matters more than it sounds. Finger numbers suit a beginner learning the shape; chord tones suit someone working out why a voicing sounds the way it does. Results also link through to a chord calculator and to scales that fit the chord.

Oolimo pairs a chord finder with a chord analyzer, and its real contribution is the writing around both. It breaks a chord symbol into its five sections, walks through how a triad becomes a seventh chord and then an extended chord, and explains which stacked thirds can be raised, lowered or left out. If you have ever stared at a symbol like C7♯9 and wanted the logic rather than just the shape, this is the reference that supplies it.

The analyzer runs the other direction: enter a shape on the virtual fretboard and it returns the correct chord name, notes and intervals. That is genuinely useful when you have stumbled onto something good and want to write it down properly.

One considerate detail: sounds are not downloaded by default, and the site asks your preference first, which keeps it light on a phone connection. The theory writing is dense, and it is not the place to go when you just want a quick shape.

Every other entry so far needs a browser and a connection. ChordBank is the native option, and the one to install before a rehearsal in a basement. It is free to download, currently at version 5.2.0, and holds a 4.7-star average across more than 6,200 App Store ratings, which is a strong showing for a utility app. The developer, Better Notes, describes a library of over 14,000 fingerings, each hand-curated rather than generated.

That curation claim is the interesting part, and the App Store listing is explicit that the shapes are not auto-generated. Software can enumerate every mathematically valid way to play a chord, and most results are unplayable or sound bad. A hand-checked library is a meaningfully different product from an exhaustive one, and it shows in which voicings you are offered first.

Beyond lookup it carries a left-handed mode, custom tunings, support for slash chords, and games that listen through the microphone as you play. Reach is the limitation: it is iOS only, and the current version requires iOS 18.6 or later, which rules out older phones. Android players should use one of the web references above, which work fine in a mobile browser.

Sometimes the right answer is paper. TrueFire publishes a free downloadable guitar chord chart plus a set of themed collections, grouped by the situation you are in rather than alphabetically: ten beginner chords, ten barre chords, ten blues, ten jazz, ten rock, fifteen country and fifteen songwriter chords. The songwriter set is the one worth printing if you write rather than cover.

Grouping by genre is a better idea than it first appears. A beginner working through an alphabetical database has no way of knowing which of 2,700 chords they will actually use this year, and a curated set of ten answers that question implicitly.

It is static, so there is no audio and no alternate voicings, and the charts exist partly to introduce TrueFire's paid video courses. Neither of those stops the chart from being free and genuinely useful.

Berklee PULSE is the online music method run by Berklee College of Music's City Music program, and its guitar chords tool is free to use. Dropdown menus select chord types and voicings, and clicking the guitar pick or the fretboard plays an audio reference. The institutional backing is the point: for a teacher assigning a reference to a class, provenance matters more than features.

The chord tool sits inside a larger set of free interactive tools worth knowing about on their own, including a tuner, a metronome, a practice timer, a piano chords reference, scales and modes, a circle of fifths chart and a song stretcher for slowing audio down without changing pitch. That collection is more useful to most learners than any single chord lookup.

The chord reference itself is one page in that suite rather than a purpose-built dictionary, so it is less deep than the specialists above, and the wider PULSE library invites you to create a free account.