How to read guitar chords: diagrams, charts and string codes

A chord diagram is a small picture of the neck of your guitar, and once you can read one you can learn any chord from anywhere. There are 8 symbols in the whole system and they take ten minutes to learn, which is a very good trade for the thing it unlocks. This page covers all of them, one at a time, with real diagrams drawn here on the page rather than described: the strings and the frets, the dots and the finger numbers, the circle and the cross above a string, the long bar of a barre, and what a diagram is telling you when it does not start at the nut. Then the other notation that goes by the same name, the chord chart in a song sheet, and the six character codes you meet in a line of text.

What a chord diagram shows

One position of one hand. Nothing else, and knowing what it leaves out is half of reading it properly.

The picture is the neck of the guitar seen from the front, held upright, with the headstock at the top and the body below. You are looking at the instrument as if it were standing in front of you, and the diagram tells you where to put the fingers of your left hand. It says nothing about rhythm, nothing about how hard to strum, nothing about how long to hold the chord. A diagram is a spelling, not a sentence.

Here is one, and we will take it apart in the next three sections. This is a C major chord, the shape most people learn third or fourth.

Four things are in that picture: six vertical lines, five horizontal ones with the top one drawn thick, three filled dots, and three markers sitting above the strings outside the grid. Under the picture sit two lines of text: the same chord written as six characters, and the finger to use on each string. The rest of this page is those four things, one at a time, and then the text versions of them.

Strings, frets and the nut

The vertical lines are the strings and the horizontal lines are the frets, and both have a direction that is worth getting right before anything else.

The strings run up and down

Six vertical lines, six strings. The thickest string, the low E, is the one on the left, and the thinnest, the high E, is on the right. That is the order you see them when the guitar is on your lap and you look down at the fretboard, which is where the convention comes from.

It is also the single thing that trips up almost every beginner, because it is the mirror image of what you see when you watch somebody facing you. If the left edge of the diagram does not feel like your low E string, pick the guitar up and look down the neck from above: the picture and the instrument then agree.

Guitarists number the strings the other way round from the diagram, confusingly enough, and both conventions are standard. The thinnest string is the first string and the thickest is the sixth. So the first string is on the right of the diagram and the sixth is on the left. This page says thickest and thinnest wherever it can, for exactly that reason.

The frets run across

The horizontal lines are the frets, meaning the metal wires set into the neck. Your fingers do not go on the wires, they go in the spaces between them, as close to the wire on the headstock side as you can manage. A dot in the second space means the second fret.

A diagram shows four of those spaces, which is as much as one hand covers comfortably. Most beginner chords fit inside the first four, which is why so many diagrams look the same size.

The nut, and when the top line is not the nut

The line along the top is drawn thick when it is the nut: the strip of bone or plastic at the end of the fretboard, where the strings leave the neck and head for the tuning pegs. A thick top line means the diagram starts at the beginning of the neck, and the first space below it is the first fret.

When the top line is thin, it is an ordinary fret and the diagram starts higher up the neck. That is covered in its own section further down, because it is the one case that genuinely changes what the picture means.

Dots, finger numbers, X and O

Four symbols, and between them they say everything the left hand needs. The table is the short version; what follows it is the part that saves you trouble.

Read the top row first

The circles and the crosses live above the nut, outside the grid, and they are the symbols beginners skip. Do not: 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 somebody decides a shape is not working. Check which strings you are meant to play, then put the fingers down.

A circle means the string sounds with nothing on it. An open string rings longer and louder than a fretted one, because it vibrates against metal rather than against a fingertip, and that is a large part of why the first chords you learn sound bigger than the effort deserves.

A cross means leave the string out, and the chord is complete without it. Two ways to obey a cross: aim the strum so you miss the string, or let a finger you already have down lean against it so it cannot ring. The second is more reliable and it is what most players end up doing without noticing.

Finger numbers are a suggestion with a good reason

Where a diagram puts a number inside a dot, it is telling you which finger to use: 1 for the index, 2 the middle, 3 the ring, 4 the little finger. The thumb is not numbered and is almost never used on the front of the neck.

You can usually hold a shape with other fingers and it will sound identical, so why obey the numbers? Because of the chord that comes next. The suggested fingering is the one that leaves your hand in a good place for the changes this chord usually leads into. Choosing your own fingering works for one chord and costs you later, when the change refuses to be smooth and the reason is three chords back.

The diagrams on this site write the finger numbers under the shape rather than inside the dots, on the second line of the caption, lined up with the frets above them. The reason is plain: a dot big enough to hold a readable number has to be large, and a number drawn inside a picture cannot be selected, searched or read aloud by a screen reader. Under the shape it is real text.

Take a C major as the worked example. Read the markers first: cross on the thickest string, so five strings, and circles on the fourth and the thinnest, so those two ring open. Then the dots, from the bottom up: third fret on the fifth string with the third finger, second fret on the fourth string with the second, first fret on the second string with the first. The fingers climb away from you in a diagonal, and that diagonal is the shape your hand remembers.

Barres and higher positions

Two things change once chords move past the first few frets, and a diagram shows both. One finger starts covering several strings, and the picture stops starting at the nut.

The long bar

A thick line running across several strings at the same fret is a barre: one finger, almost always the index, lying flat so it presses everything under it at once. It does the job the nut does, which is why a chord built on a barre can be slid along the neck while an open chord cannot.

Here is the most famous one. An F major at the first fret, with the index flat across all six strings and three more fingers above it.

Notice what is missing from that picture: there is no circle anywhere, because no string rings open. That absence is the signature of a movable shape, and it is how you can tell at a glance that a diagram can be slid up the neck. The F chord in particular has six usable shapes, half of them with no barre at all, and they are written out on the F chord on guitar. For the method that makes a barre ring without the hand ache, the barre chords guide is the page.

When the diagram does not start at the nut

Slide that same shape up the neck and the picture has a problem: the first fret is no longer in it. So the diagram moves its window, and it tells you so in two ways. The top line becomes thin, because it is an ordinary fret rather than the nut. And a fret number appears, either down the side of the grid or written next to it, saying which fret the top of the window is.

Our diagrams say it in the code underneath instead, which carries the real fret numbers: a shape written 5 7 7 6 5 5 is at the fifth fret and nowhere else. Compare these two. Same shape, same fingers, different place, different chord.

The first two are the same six characters moved by four frets. The third is a different shape, rooted on the fifth string rather than the sixth, and the cross on the thickest string is the clue.

The same shape, four places, four names

This is what reading a higher position buys you. The shape below has its root note under the index finger on the thickest string, so the note that string plays at the barre fret is the name of the chord. The table is calculated from the chromatic scale rather than copied, which is also how you work it out yourself.

One shape, four chords, and it does not stop at four. There are five such movable shapes on the neck, one taken from each of the open C, A, G, E and D chords, and the CAGED system is the name for the whole set. Reading a diagram that starts at the eighth fret is the skill that makes that page usable.

Reading a chord chart in a song

The phrase chord chart means two different things, and both are standard. One is a page of diagrams, like our printable guitar chord chart. The other is the notation you find above the words of a song, and it answers a completely different question: not how to hold a chord, but when to play it.

It looks like this. Vertical bars mark the bars of the music, and the chord written inside one is the chord you play for that whole bar.

| C      | G      | Am     | F      |
| C      | G      | F      | F      |

Read it left to right, top to bottom, like text. Two lines, eight bars, four chords. Each chord lasts one bar, and a bar in most popular music is four beats, so you are holding each shape for a slow count of four before moving to the next.

Dots, repeats and the two or three things to watch

A bar with more than one chord in it splits the beats between them, and careful sheets write dots for the beats so you can see where the change falls.

| C  .  .  . | G  .  .  . | Am .  .  . | F  .  .  . |

Four symbols cover most of what else you will meet. A percent sign or a pair of dots usually means repeat the previous bar. A slash inside a bar is one beat of the chord written before it. A chord name with a slash in it, like C over G, names the chord and then the note you put in the bass. And a line at the top saying capo 2 changes everything below it: the frets are counted from the capo, so the chords sound two half steps higher than their names. Our guitar capo chart says which shape sounds as which chord at every fret.

Tab is the third notation in common use, and it answers yet another question: which note on which string, one at a time, rather than a chord as a block. If the thing in front of you is six horizontal lines with numbers on them, that is a tab, and how to read guitar tabs covers it from the beginning.

String codes like x32010

In a line of text, where a picture will not fit, a chord gets written as six characters. It is the most compact notation there is and it carries everything except the finger numbers.

Read the characters from the thickest string to the thinnest, one per string, in the same order as the diagram reads left to right. A number is the fret to press. A 0 is an open string, the circle of a diagram. An x is a string you do not play, the cross of a diagram. So x32010 says: skip the thickest string, third fret, second fret, open, first fret, open. That is the C major from the top of this page, and it is the same information in eleven characters instead of a picture.

Two details are worth knowing. Positions above the ninth fret need two digits per string, so the characters get separated by spaces to stay readable: 8 10 10 9 8 8 rather than an unreadable run of digits. And the code does not say which finger goes where, so a shape that can be fingered two ways looks identical either way. That is usually fine and occasionally matters.

These codes are also what tools accept as input. Type one into our guitar chord finder and it draws the shape, finger numbers and barres included, anywhere on the neck. There is no chord dictionary in it: you give it the code and it draws what you gave it, which makes it the fastest way to check whether you have read a code correctly.

Five diagrams to read right now

Nothing here is new. These are five chords you will meet in your first weeks, drawn with every symbol this page has covered, and the exercise is to read each one out loud before you play it: which strings, which frets, which fingers.

Say it in this order every time, and the order is the point. First the markers: how many strings am I playing, and which ones ring open. Then the dots from the thickest string to the thinnest: which fret, which finger. Then put the hand down as one shape rather than one finger at a time, and play the strings one by one to hear which of them is not sounding.

Three of those five share a family resemblance, and spotting it is what reading diagrams is for. A minor and E minor use the same three fingers in the same relative positions, one string apart. C and A minor differ by a single finger. Those are not coincidences, and once you can read a diagram you start seeing them without being told.

Each of the five is written out finger by finger, with the fault it usually produces and the change it leads into, on our page about the basic guitar chords. That is where to go next if a shape in the grid above is not ringing cleanly yet.