The 20 chords that cover most of popular music

Tap any chord to hear it strummed. Numbers inside the dots are which finger to use: 1 = index, 2 = middle, 3 = ring, 4 = pinky. O above a string means play it open; × means don't play it. The amber bar across the F and Bm diagrams is a "barre" — one finger laid flat across multiple strings.

Audio is synthesised steel-string acoustic timbre. A real guitar has pick attack, string-noise, and body resonance no oscillator can reproduce — but the chord identities come through cleanly enough to learn by ear.

How to read a chord diagram

A chord diagram is a flat picture of the guitar fretboard as you would see it if you held the instrument up in front of you, facing you. The six vertical lines are the six strings — leftmost is the lowest-pitched (6th, low E), rightmost is the highest (1st, high E). The horizontal lines are the frets; the thick line across the top is the nut, which is fret zero.

Each amber dot shows where to press a finger. The number inside the dot tells you which finger to use: 1 is your index finger, 2 middle, 3 ring, 4 pinky. The O above a string means play that string open — touch nothing, let it ring. An × above a string means do not play that string at all — mute it with the side of a finger or skip it.

A wide horizontal bar across several strings (you'll see this on the F and Bm diagrams above) is a barre: lay your index finger flat across the indicated strings at that fret, pressing them all simultaneously. The other fingers form a shape on top of the barre. Barre chords are the technique that lets you play any chord anywhere on the neck once you know the shape.

The CAGED system — why these 5 shapes give you the whole neck

One of guitar's quiet design miracles: every major chord on the instrument can be played using one of just five fingering shapes — the open C, A, G, E and D shapes. Move any of these shapes up the neck and barre across the relevant strings with your index finger, and you have any major chord you want.

The clearest example: the E major shape (022100) moved up one fret with the index finger laid across the 1st fret becomes the F barre chord. Move that whole shape up two more frets and it's G major. Up two more, A major. The shape doesn't change — only its position on the neck does. Same for the A shape (becomes B at fret 2, C at fret 3), the C shape, the G shape and the D shape.

CAGED is what every serious guitarist eventually internalises. The five shapes connect end-to-end up the entire fretboard, so any pitch is reachable from at least one of them. Beginners learn the open shapes; intermediates learn to move them around with a barre; advanced players see the fretboard as five overlapping CAGED grids rather than 22 separate frets.

Why three chords cover thousands of songs

Western pop, rock, country and folk music is overwhelmingly built on three chord positions within a key, called I, IV and V (one, four, five). In the key of G major, those are G (I), C (IV) and D (V). The same three positions in C major are C, F and G; in D they are D, G and A. Almost every blues song, every Bo Diddley tune, every country sing-along is some arrangement of just these three chords.

Add the relative minor (the vi, "six minor" — Em in the key of G) and you have the four chords that the Australian comedy band Axis of Awesome demonstrated in 2009 as "the four chords of pop" — I, V, vi, IV, or G-D-Em-C in the key of G. Their viral video sequenced 47 hit songs from the 1980s onward over the same four-chord loop without changing key. The trick works because so many songwriters land on those four chords without consciously planning to.

Once you can play C, G, D, Em, Am and F, you have effectively unlocked the harmonic vocabulary of most popular Western music. Everything else is rhythm, melody, lyrics, and finding interesting ways to move between those same six destinations.

Practical tips for learning these

Press just behind the fret, not on top of it. Pressing right behind the metal fret wire produces a clean note with the least finger pressure. Pressing in the middle of the fret buzzes; pressing on the wire mutes the string. This is the biggest beginner mistake by a wide margin.

Curl your fingers over the strings. Use the fingertips, not the pads. If your finger is laying flat, it will accidentally mute the adjacent string. Curling each finger over so it lands vertically on its target string is awkward at first and effortless within a few weeks.

Strum once. Listen for dead strings. Fix the offending finger. Strum again. This diagnostic loop is what produces a clean chord. If a string buzzes or doesn't ring, the finger covering it is the problem — too flat, not enough pressure, or accidentally touching an adjacent string. Don't strum harder; diagnose and fix the finger.

Practice changing chords more than playing chords. Beginners spend hours holding a single chord clean, then panic when they have to switch to another. Once a chord rings cleanly, immediately practise moving to another chord. The skill of guitar playing is in the transitions, not the destinations.

Use the tuner before every session. A guitar that drifts even a few cents flat will sound discouraging — strings against discord. A correctly tuned guitar makes the chord shapes you are learning sound the way they are supposed to sound. The free guitar tuner is here →

Looking for chords to a specific song?

This page teaches the chord shapes. For song-by-song chord transcriptions, the standard online reference is ultimate-guitar.com — millions of community-submitted entries covering effectively the entire popular-music catalogue. Once the 20 chords above are in your hands, almost any song chart there becomes playable.

A printable beginner-songbook page is on our build list.

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