This is a guitar chord chart you can read here and print when you want it: the 24 shapes that cover most of the pop, rock and folk repertoire, each one drawn with its fingering, the strings to play and the barres. Every diagram is on this page, right below. Under them sits the generator that laid them out, so you can change the size, the colors or the list itself and send the result to a printer or to a PDF. No account, nothing to install, like the rest of our free guitar tools.
The 24 chords
In the order you learn them. Five open majors, two barre majors, three open minors, two barre minors, then six sevenths and six richer voicings that color what you already know how to play.
The shapes are grouped by what they ask of your left hand rather than by music theory. The open chords need no barre and no stretch. The four barre shapes need one finger lying flat, which is a real step up. The sevenths and the richer voicings mostly lift a finger off a shape you already hold, so they sound more advanced than they are to play.
How to read a chord diagram
Each diagram is the neck seen head on, with the headstock at the top: the six strings run vertically, from the lowest on the left to the highest on the right, and the frets run across. Your low E string is the left hand edge of the picture, which is the one thing that confuses almost everyone at first.
| Symbol | What it means |
|---|---|
| x | Above a string: do not play it. Mute it with a finger or simply avoid it with the pick. |
| o | Above a string: play it open, with no finger on it at all. Open strings are what make these shapes ring. |
| 1 to 4 | Inside a dot: which finger presses there. 1 is the index, 2 the middle, 3 the ring, 4 the little finger. |
| A dot | Press that string, in that fret space, with the finger written in it. |
| A thick line at the top | The nut, where the fretboard ends and the tuning pegs begin. The chart always starts there. |
| A bar across the diagram | A barre: one finger, usually the index, lies flat across several strings in the same fret. F, B, Bm and F#m need one. |
| Numbers down the right side | The frets, counted from the nut. They tell you how far up the neck your hand sits. |
One habit worth building early: read the x and o markers before the dots. A chord played on the wrong strings sounds wrong even when every finger is in the right place, and that is the most common reason a beginner thinks a shape is not working. Check the top row first, then put the fingers down.
Why these 24 chords
Because of what they let you play, not because of how they look on a chart. The 8 open shapes alone carry a large share of the pop and folk repertoire: a great many songs are built from four of them in a loop, and learning the loop is learning the songs. The four barre shapes are the ones that open the common keys, which is why they earn a place on a beginner's wall even though they are harder.
The sevenths are where blues and rock and roll live, and they are nearly free: A7 is an A with a finger lifted, E7 the same trick on E. The richer voicings, the minor sevenths and Cmaj7 and Cadd9, are the sound of modern pop, and they ask less of your hand than the chords they replace. Nothing on this chart goes past the fourth fret, so every shape fits inside the same diagram window.
What a chart cannot give you is the order to learn them in, or what to do once a shape is under your fingers. That is the next section, and then the songs.
Beginner chord chart: start with these 8
A basic guitar chord chart does not need 24 shapes. It needs 8, all open, all inside the first three frets, all on the grid above: E, A, D, G, C, Em, Am, Dm.
The order matters more than the list, and so does what to do once a shape is under your fingers. Both are on our page about the basic guitar chords, which writes each of the 8 out string by string and finger by finger, with the change it leads into.
Barre chords can wait. F and Bm are a later step, and the F chord alone comes in six shapes, half of them with no barre at all. The barre chords guide says when to start on the rest.
From the chart to songs
A chord chart is a reference, and a reference only pays off when you use it on something. Pick a song that runs on three or four of the open shapes, learn the loop, and let the chart answer the questions that come up along the way. Our list of easy guitar songs for beginners is sorted by what each one actually asks of you, so you can choose one that needs nothing you have not practiced yet.
Before the first chord, tune up. Our online guitar tuner listens through your microphone and shows how far each string is off, which matters more than usual at this stage: an out of tune guitar makes a correct chord sound wrong, and sends you looking for a mistake in your fingers that is not there.
Three pages pick up where this chart stops. A shape it does not hold, drawn the way you want it, comes from the guitar chord finder. A chord you can hear in a recording but cannot name goes into what chord is this. And the orders these shapes are played in, key by key, are on guitar chord progressions.
If what you want is the empty grid rather than this one, so you can write your own fingerings by hand, our blank chord chart prints the diagrams with nothing in them. And the three strings and three fingers of a power chord are the one family of shapes this chart leaves out on purpose, because they are easier to find from a root than to look up.
Frequently asked questions
Which chords are on this guitar chord chart?
How do I print the chart or save it as a PDF?
Can I change the chords on the chart?
What is the difference between a chord chart and a chord diagram?
Is a printed chart still useful, or should I just look it up?
Who made this
Guitar Social Club is the work of Yohann Abbou, a guitar teacher in Paris. He teaches adults, which shapes everything here: people with jobs, limited practice time and a clear idea of the songs they want to play. This chart holds the shapes his students actually reach for, in the order he teaches them, which is why it stops at 24 rather than running to every shape that exists. The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way, and none of them asks you to sign up before it works. More about who writes these pages and how they are checked is on our about page.