Guitar Chord Player

Guitar Chord Player
Write a line of chords, press play, and hear the progression strummed — with the fingering for every shape. No guitar and no recording needed.
Try:
The whole progression as one file — about 11s · 947 KB
How to hold it
C
✕○○321654321
  • 1String 2, fret 1 — index finger
  • 2String 4, fret 2 — middle finger
  • 3String 5, fret 3 — ring finger
○ Play open: string 3, 1
✕ Do not play: string 6
Instrument
Real recordings — fetched once per instrument on first play, about 250 KB
Tempo
90 BPM
Rhythm
One bar at the chosen grid — click a cell to change it
Bass
Drums
Loop
Metronome
Progression
1
C
✕○○321
2
G
○○○213
3
Am
✕○○231
4
F
342
Instrument recordings: FluidR3_GM · gleitz/midi-js-soundfonts · CC BY 3.0

Write a chord progression on one line, press play, and hear it strummed at whatever tempo you can follow. Every chord is drawn as a diagram with the finger that stops each string, so you can learn how a progression sounds — and how to hold it — before you can play it cleanly.

How to use Guitar Chord Player

  1. Type the chords separated by spaces. Each one lasts a bar, so "C G Am F" is four bars.
  2. Pick the instrument — steel-string, nylon, electric or piano.
  3. Build the rhythm: choose strumming or picking, a grid of quarters, eighths or sixteenths, then click a cell to cycle it through rest, down-stroke and up-stroke. Bass and drums have their own switches.
  4. Set the tempo. Start slower than feels right — the point is to hear the change coming, not to keep up.
  5. Press play. The bar being strummed is highlighted, and the panel on the left shows how to hold that chord as it passes.
  6. Turn on the metronome to play along, and leave loop on to keep the progression running while you practise.
  7. Press Export to save the whole progression as an audio file — pick ×2, ×4 or ×8 to get a longer practice loop. The toggle beside the button decides what you get: OPUS is about a tenth the size of the WAV, MP3 plays on anything, and WAV is what an editor wants.
  8. Press Copy link to put the whole setup into a URL. Opening it anywhere loads the same chords, rhythm, instrument and tempo.

Tips & gotchas

  • Diagrams number the fingers 1 to 4, index to little, and the steps beside them carry the same numbers — so a dot in the picture and the line describing it always match. A rounded bar across several strings is one finger held flat — a barre — and because that is a single movement it is a single step.
  • ○ above a string means play it open; ✕ means do not let it sound.
  • Down-strokes sweep every string of the chord, up-strokes only the treble ones. That asymmetry is what makes a pattern sound like a hand instead of a grid.
  • Chord spelling is forgiving: Bb and A#, Cmin7 and Cm7, FM7 and Fmaj7 all reach the same shape.
  • Tempo, pattern and the chord line are kept in this browser, so the page comes back the way you left it.

Frequently asked questions

Where does the sound come from — are there audio files?

Both, and you choose. **Recorded** plays real instrument samples: one recording every three semitones, fetched once per instrument on first play, about 250 KB. **Synth** synthesises every note in your browser and downloads nothing at all — the guitars and bass are Karplus-Strong strings, the piano is a stack of partials tuned slightly sharp of the harmonic series the way stiff piano wire behaves, and the drums are a pitch-swept sine and filtered noise. Drums and fret noise are synthesised either way. The recordings are FluidR3_GM, via gleitz/midi-js-soundfonts, used under CC BY 3.0.

Why is the first press of play silent for a moment?

Browsers only allow audio to start from a click, so the first press builds the sound engine and renders every note the progression needs before the first strum. After that it starts instantly.

Which export format should I pick?

Opus and WAV cost you nothing to produce: your browser already contains an Opus encoder, and a WAV is a 44-byte header in front of the samples. Opus is around a tenth the size of the WAV and the same length to the millisecond, which makes it the right default for anything that will be played on a phone or dropped into a video. WAV is what to pick when the file is going into an editor, or anywhere old enough not to know what a .opus is. MP3 sits between them: it is the format that opens absolutely everywhere, and the only one here that has to fetch an encoder — about 170 kB of LAME compiled to JavaScript, downloaded the first time you export one and never on page load. To trim what you exported, or to change its format afterwards, the audio converter and trimmer does both.

Which chords does it know?

Major, minor, dominant 7th, major 7th, minor 7th, sus2, sus4, add9 and power chords on all twelve roots, plus common slash voicings such as G/B and D/F#. Diminished and augmented chords are not included yet. A slash chord that is not in the library is played as the plain triad, and the page tells you when that happens rather than pretending the voicing is exact.

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