Every chord here is computed from the notes your fingers actually press — then named, spelled, and explained. Move any shape up the neck and watch the same intervals make a new chord.
Pick the fret you'd lay your index finger across — or add a capo. These are the chords that one barre puts under your fingers — tap any of them to see it on the neck and read why it's that chord.
Each column is a shape; each row is where you barre it. Click any chord to see it on the neck and read why it's that chord. Fret 0 = the open chord.
Put your fingers anywhere on the neck and tap the same spots here — it names the chord live, and if you're close it tells you what to add. Great for "wait, what is this chord?"
Every note on the whole fingerboard at once. Pick a root to colour each position by its interval, or choose a scale to light up just its notes — with the chord skeleton (1·3·5·7) coloured inside it and the key's diatonic chords listed below. The same note keeps reappearing in a pattern as you travel up a string or across to the next one.
Paste a tab below — six lines for guitar, four for ukulele, highest-sounding string on top. The app reads the fret numbers, then walks through it note by note: each one lights up where your finger goes on the neck, while the whole thing is written out as real notation on the staff. The starter tab is a C major scale, so you can watch a scale become music.
Taking a hand off the strings to hit a button defeats the point. Two ways around it:
With this on, Space plays/pauses and the ← → (or Page Up / Page Down) keys step back and forward. Any Bluetooth or USB page-turner foot pedal — the kind musicians use for sheet music — sends exactly those keys, so you can advance the tab with your foot and never let go of the guitar.
With this on, just say “next”, “back”, “play”, or “stop”. It uses your browser's speech recognition (works best in Chrome and needs microphone permission; the audio is handled by the browser, not this page).
The six lines are your six strings, viewed as if the guitar is lying in your lap facing up. The top line is the thinnest, highest-sounding string; the bottom line is the thick low one. A number sits on a string and tells you which fret to press there — 0 means play that string open, with no finger. You read left to right as time passes, the way you read words. Numbers stacked in the same vertical column are played together as a chord; numbers spread out across the line are played one after another as a melody.
A few extra marks show how to play a note rather than which one: h hammer-on, p pull-off, / slide up, \ slide down, b bend the string, ~ vibrato, x a muted, percussive hit. They change the sound, not the location — so this reader still shows you exactly where the note lives.
Saving & sharing tabs. Use Download JSON to save the current tab as a small .json file that also remembers the instrument, tuning, and tempo. Upload JSON (or just drag a file onto the box) loads one back. It's plain text you can open and edit in any editor, so a teacher can prepare a set of exercise files and hand them out.
One note or chord, shown one way — pick the matching answer. Choose what to drill below; it builds the link between the written page, the tab, the shape, and where your finger actually goes (and you hear it too).
Each fret raises the pitch of a string by one semitone — the smallest step in Western music. Twelve semitones and you've gone up an octave: the same note name again, higher. That's why the patterns on the neck map repeat every twelve frets. The twelve note names cycle C, C♯, D, E♭, E, F, F♯, G, A♭, A, B♭, B, then back to C.
An interval is just the distance between two notes, counted in semitones. Distances have names and characters: 4 semitones up is a major third (bright), 3 is a minor third (darker), 7 is a perfect fifth (stable). The colours in this tool always mean the same interval from whatever root you pick — that's the whole idea behind the neck map.
Stack a few notes that sound good together and you have a chord. The common ones are built from the 1st, 3rd, and 5th notes of a scale — that's why the chord view colours those three. Swap the major third for a minor third and a major chord becomes minor; add the 7th and you get the richer 7th chords. A barre chord is just one of these shapes slid up the neck.
A scale is a chosen set of notes — a palette for one key. Major sounds happy and settled; minor sounds darker; the small pentatonic is the five-note set most solos live in. You use a scale three ways: melodies and solos are built by moving around its notes; the chords that "belong together" in a song are built by stacking thirds on each scale note (the chords in this key the scale view lists); and knowing the scale tells you which notes will sound right to add. Pick a root and a scale above and the neck shows you the whole palette at once.
Tab tells your fingers where to go — which string, which fret — and nothing about pitch or rhythm. The staff tells you the actual pitches, the same for any instrument, which is why a flute player and a guitarist can read the same line. The tab reader above shows both at once so you can see one turn into the other.
Here's the chain: pick a key → its scale gives you the notes that belong → stack those notes into chords → arrange the chords into a progression and pick out a melody from the same scale → write the finger moves as tab or the actual pitches on the staff. Every section of this page is one link in that chain. Wander between them and the mystery gets a lot smaller.
Have an idea? It can be added to this list.
Plain-language definitions for the terms that show up around this page and on tab sites.