What Chord Is This? Guitar Chord Namer and Audio Chord Analyzer

This is a guitar chord namer. You give it audio, it tells you which chord is sounding, and it keeps a timestamped list of every change so you end up with a chord chart instead of a guess. Three ways in: an audio file, a direct audio link, or the sound of a browser tab. Free, in your browser, no account, and nothing is uploaded. It sits alongside the rest of our free guitar tools.

One thing to be clear about before you start: there is no microphone mode here. If you want to name a chord you are playing yourself, record a few seconds of it first and drop that file in. It takes ten seconds longer and it gives the analyzer a cleaner thing to listen to.

How to use it: audio file, link or tab capture

Pick a source, start the sound, start the analysis. Everything else is an adjustment you make once you can see what the tool is doing.

Source	Best for	What to watch for
Audio file	Working out a song, a demo or something you recorded yourself	MP3, WAV, AAC and M4A decode well. Exotic formats may not.
Direct audio link	A file already hosted somewhere you can link to	Only works if that server allows the access. Otherwise capture the tab.
Browser tab capture	A page that is already playing the audio	Depends on the browser and on what it lets you share.

The six steps

Choose the source. Load a file, paste a direct link, or capture the tab that is playing.
Start the sound. Press Play for a file or a link. A captured tab is played from the tab itself.
Start the analysis. The chord appears in large type and the timeline starts filling in underneath.
Set the chord families to match the style: 7 for blues, maj7 and m7 for anything jazzier, sus4 for a lot of folk and pop.
Transpose the display if you are playing with a capo or tuned down. The sound does not change, only the names you read.
Take the result with you. Copy the chords, copy them as bars, or export JSON, MIDI, PDF or a chord chart.

The settings worth touching

Chord families

Major and minor are always on. Dominant 7, maj7, m7, sus4, diminished and augmented are switches, and so are inversions. Turning all of them on at once is a mistake worth avoiding: every family you allow is one more candidate the analyzer has to rule out, so it hesitates more. Switch on what the song actually uses.

Bass notes only

This narrows the listening to the low end. It helps on a dense mix, where the chord is hard to pick out but the bass line is clear. You get the root movement rather than the full name, which is often all you need to write the progression down.

Beats per bar and quantize

Set 4 or 3 beats per bar, and quantize to quarter, eighth or sixteenth notes. Those two settings are what turn a list of timestamps into bars you can read. They are also what the Copy as bars button and the chord chart export use.

Transpose

Up to six half steps either way, display only. Capo on the second fret and you can read the names as the shapes you are actually holding. Tuned a half step down and the same applies in the other direction.

Streaming platforms, and YouTube

A streaming link pasted into the link field will not load. That is not a bug in the tool: those pages are not direct audio files, and the browser blocks the access. A YouTube link is the case you will meet most often, and the tool recognizes it and says so rather than failing silently: it tells you to use tab capture instead.

Tab capture is the way around all of them. Open the page in its own tab, come back here, start the capture, choose that tab, remember to share its audio, then start playback.

Before you play the chart you just found, put the guitar in tune. A chord name is only useful against six strings that are where they should be, and our online guitar tuner handles that in about a minute.

What the analyzer can and cannot hear

It helps to know what is happening inside, because then the mistakes stop being mysterious. The tool builds a spectrum of the sound, folds that energy into the twelve note classes, and compares the result against chord templates. The best match wins, with some smoothing so the name does not flicker from one instant to the next. It is pattern matching on what the sound contains, not listening the way you listen.

Where it is solid

Clean major and minor chords, held and let ring
Straightforward pop, rock and folk progressions
One guitar, one piano, or a thin arrangement
A recording of yourself playing one chord at a time

Where it struggles

Heavy distortion, which fills the spectrum with extra notes
A dense mix, where several instruments overlap
Richly altered chords, past the families it knows
Fast changes, where one chord barely sounds before the next

The relative chord problem

A minor and C major share two notes out of three. So do E minor and G major, and every other relative pair. When the bass is quiet or the chord is short, those two names look almost the same to the analyzer, and it can pick the wrong one. This is the single most common error, and the easiest to catch: play the root it proposes. If that note sounds like the place the phrase comes to rest, the name is right. If it sounds restless, try the relative.

Inversions and the bass note

When the lowest note is not the root, the chord is inverted, and the analyzer can hesitate between two names for the same handful of notes. The inversions switch tells it to consider those cases, which helps on written arrangements and on anything with a walking bass. Without it, an inverted chord often gets named after its bass note instead.

Read the confidence meter

The meter next to the chord name is not decoration. A full meter means the sound matched one template clearly. A low meter means several names were close, and that is exactly where you should stop and use your ears. This page will not give you an accuracy figure, because the number would depend entirely on the recording you feed it. What it will tell you is where to look twice.

Treat the output as a draft. A detector gets you to a playable chart in minutes instead of an hour, and your ear is what makes that chart correct. The two together are faster than either one alone.

From the name to the shape

Knowing a chord is called F#m7 is only half of it. The other half is finding it under your fingers, and that is a different question.

The diagram in the tool

Every chord the analyzer names comes with a diagram drawn beside it, so the shape arrives with the name. That is usually enough when the chord is one you half know. For the ones you do not, a fuller reference helps: our guitar chord chart lays out the essential open and barre chords as clear diagrams, on screen and as a printable PDF.

Why that chord lives where it does

If you want the reason behind the shape rather than the shape alone, look at where its notes actually sit. Our interactive guitar fretboard lights up every note of a chord across all six strings, and colors them by degree, so the root, the third and the fifth stop being anonymous dots. That is the view that explains why one chord has several forms up the neck, and why a shape you learned by hand moves the way it does.

A chord you have never played

Some chords the analyzer names will be new to you. Our guitar chord finder draws any one of them, and it is worth knowing what it does before you open it: there is no chord dictionary in it, so it will not hand you a voicing for a name. You give it the shape, as a string code or by clicking the grid, and it draws a clean diagram with the finger numbers, the barres and the window on the neck. So it is the tool for keeping a shape once you have found it, not for looking one up.

To find the shape in the first place, the chord chart covers what most songs are built from, and the fretboard shows you where the rest of the notes are.

Then play something with it

A chart you never play is a file on your computer. Once the names are down, it is worth seeing what the progression actually is: four chords in a loop usually turn out to be one of a handful of orders, and our page on chord progressions names them and gives them in every key. Knowing which one you are looking at is what lets you guess the next chord instead of checking it.

Then pick a song that uses the chords you just found and work it slowly, one section at a time. If you want a place to start, our list of easy guitar songs for beginners is sorted by what the right hand has to do, which is the thing that actually decides whether a song is easy.

Frequently asked questions

How do I find out what chord is playing in a song?

Give the analyzer the audio and read the name it puts on screen. Three ways in: drop the file in, paste a direct audio link, or capture the browser tab that is playing it. The chord appears in large type with a confidence meter next to it, and every change lands on a timestamped timeline you can copy or export. Then check it by ear, because a name on a screen is a starting point, not a verdict.

What chord am I playing? Can I check my own guitar with this?

Yes, with one extra step: there is no microphone mode here, so record yourself first. Four or five seconds of the chord, held and let ring, on the voice recorder that came with your phone or computer. Drop that file in and start the analysis. Recording one chord at a time is also the honest way to test the tool, because a single sustained chord is the clearest thing you can hand it.

Can the chord analyzer be wrong?

Yes, and the confidence meter exists to say so. It holds up well on clean major and minor chords and on straightforward pop, rock and folk progressions. It gets unsure with heavy distortion, a dense mix or richly altered chords, and it can confuse a chord with its relative, since A minor and C major share two notes out of three. The check takes two seconds: play the root it suggests. If that note sounds like the resting point, the name is right.

Which chords does it recognize?

Major and minor are always on. Dominant 7, maj7, m7, sus4, diminished and augmented are switches you turn on under the advanced options, along with inversions and a bass note only mode. Turning on everything at once is not the best setting: the more families you allow, the more candidates the analyzer has to choose between. Start with major and minor, then add the family the style of the song actually uses.

Is it free, and does my audio get uploaded anywhere?

Free, with no account, and nothing is uploaded. The analysis runs in your browser, on your machine, which is why a file you drop in never leaves it. It works on a phone, a tablet or a computer with a current browser. Tab capture is the one part that varies, because each browser and each operating system decides for itself what it lets a page record.

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 tool exists because working out the chords of a song by ear is a skill that takes years, and a beginner who wants to play that song this month cannot wait for it. A detector shortens the first step. It does not replace the ear, which is why the page tells you where it hesitates rather than claiming a score.

The rest of our free guitar tools work the same way: in the browser, no account, built because a student needed it. More about who writes these pages and how they are checked is on our about page.

What chord is this? Drop in the audio, the tool names it

Chord analyzer name it, then chart it