Pick a mood.
Get the chords.

Pick an instrument, choose a mood or genre, and press Gimme chords. You get a set of chords with fingerings, a suggested strum or picking pattern, and a tempo that suits the style. Press Play to hear the whole thing, or tap any chord to hear just that one.

Vertical lines are strings, horizontal lines are frets, and the thick bar at the top is the nut. Numbered dots tell you which finger to use: 1 is your index finger and 4 your little finger. A small circle above a string means play it open; a cross means don't play that string at all. The letters along the bottom name each open string.

They're fret numbers, shown whenever a shape sits higher up the neck. If the rows read 5, 6, 7, 8, the top row of the grid is the fifth fret, so a dot on that row means press the fifth fret. Shapes at the very bottom of the neck show the thick nut instead and need no numbers.

How long to hold that chord before changing. In 4/4 one bar is four beats, so "2 bars" means eight beats and "½ bar" means change halfway through. The header shows the total length of the progression.

A down arrow is a downstroke, an up arrow an upstroke, and a gap is a rest. The counts underneath (1 & 2 &) tell you where in the beat each stroke falls. Keep your hand moving through the rests rather than stopping. The row is one bar; repeat it for as long as the chord is held. In picking mode the row names strings instead, and the highlighted ones are your thumb on the bass. Tap any step to change it: strum steps cycle down, up and rest, and picking steps let you choose the string.

Tap any chord. Chords ring on for a couple of seconds and overlap, so you can tap two or three in a row to hear how a change actually sounds, a bit like holding a sustain pedal. It won't interrupt the metronome if you have it running.

They're Roman numerals naming each chord by its position in the key rather than its letter. In C major, I is C, IV is F, V is G and vi is A minor. Capitals are major chords, lower case are minor. The same pattern works in any key: I V vi IV gives C, G, Am, F in C, and G, D, Em, C in G.

A chord borrowed from a different key to push harder into the chord after it. V7/vi means "the dominant chord belonging to vi". In C major that's E7, which leans strongly into A minor. It adds a note outside the key and creates a stronger pull than the plain chord would.

A chord taken from the parallel major or minor key. The most common is ♭VII, which is B♭ in C major, and it gives a slightly rock or folk modal colour. Advanced uses more of them, and genres like Indie and Alt rock lean on them heavily.

That's usually deliberate. Some endings resolve home; others hang on the dominant, turn somewhere unexpected, or end on a chord that pulls back round so the progression loops cleanly. Tense and Mysterious favour unresolved endings; Triumphant and Country resolve firmly.

In Advanced, chords are sometimes coloured with the seventh that suits their place in the key: maj7 on I and IV, m7 on the minor chords, a plain 7 on V. Easy keeps to plain major and minor shapes, plus the dominant sevenths some styles depend on, like the blues. Every shape is worked out from your instrument's tuning, so anything shown is guaranteed to be holdable.

Yes, with the Key menu. On Auto the style picks a key that suits it; choose one and the progression moves there. It's a real transposition rather than a relabelling: the Roman numerals stay put and the chords are rebuilt in the new key, so secondary dominants and borrowed chords keep working. All 24 major and minor keys are available.

It changes how the chords are fingered, not which chords you get. With it on, one open string keeps ringing through every chord and the bass walks up or down by a fret or two instead of jumping. That open string means something different in each chord, which is what ties them together, and where names like Dadd11 and Gmaj7 come from. It's in Advanced, and toggling it re-voices the progression you already have.

A slash chord changes which note sounds lowest, which needs a real bass register. Standard ukulele tuning is reentrant: the 4th string is tuned high, so there's no true bass note and the inversion would be in name only. On ukulele those chords show as ordinary shapes.

No. The bar lengths are a starting suggestion. In Advanced, Harmonic rhythm lets you ask for two chords per bar, one every two bars, or a varied mix. Beyond that, treat it as raw material and place the changes wherever your song wants them.

Each style starts at a tempo typical for it, but the tempo slider overrides it freely. Slow it right down while you learn the changes, then bring it back. Reset tempo returns it to the suggested speed for the style. The metronome runs on its own, so you can practise to a click without the demo playing; while the demo plays, the same button turns its click on or off. On a keyboard, the space bar plays and stops.

The diagrams assume standard tuning, GCEA on ukulele and EADGBE on guitar. A capo works fine: play the shapes as shown and everything sounds higher, though the chord names on screen will no longer match what you hear. Alternative tunings aren't supported, as the fingerings would all be wrong.

They're drawn right handed, which is the standard. If you play a mirrored instrument, read each diagram flipped horizontally: the string on the far left becomes the one on the far right.

Yes, freely, including commercially. Chord progressions are basic musical building blocks and aren't protected by copyright. The same handful of sequences underpin thousands of well known songs. What you write on top of one is yours.

Yes. Tap the small arrow in the corner of any chord to see what else fits there: the chords that sit most naturally between its neighbours first, then the rest of the key, and in Advanced the borrowed chords, a chord that leads into the next one, and sevenths. Tapping the chord itself still just plays it. A swapped chord is marked, its original stays at the top of the menu so you can go back, and swaps travel with your saved progressions and shared links.

Press Copy link for a short link to exactly what you're looking at: chords, timing, your strum or picking pattern and tempo, so whoever opens it sees the same progression rather than a new one. No account is needed. Press Save to keep it in your library on this device.

They're composed on the spot from music theory, two ways. Some phrases are walked chord by chord using weighted rules about how chords tend to move, with voice leading checks that favour shared notes and small bass moves. Others are built from the schemas that studies of thousands of songs keep finding: the I V vi IV loop, the Andalusian cadence, the Pachelbel bass line, the ♭VII IV I rock cadence and about twenty more. Loop based genres like pop, lo-fi and reggaetón lean on those more. When a schema is used, the line under the chords names it. No song is copied: a schema is a shared building block, not a melody or a recording.

Only harmonically. Those styles are defined far more by their beats and production than their chords, and a strummed instrument can't reproduce a dembow drum loop or a dusty sampler. You get the chord loop underneath, which is a decent writing starting point rather than an imitation of the record.

Yes, recordings of one. Guitar plays a steel string acoustic recorded note by note; ukulele plays a nylon string guitar recorded in the ukulele's range, shaped to sound like a smaller body. Each note is the recording nearest the fret you're holding, tuned to it, so what you hear matches the diagram on screen. Downstrokes land harder than upstrokes, guitar upstrokes catch mostly the treble strings, blues swings, and reggae skanks are choked short. It's still a strummed demo rather than a performance, and on a slow connection the first few notes may use a synthesized string while the recordings load. Sound credits.