Chords: open, barre, and voicing families
A chord is just a handful of notes from a scale, stacked and played together. Once you know which notes a chord asks for, you can find it in a dozen places on the neck. This is how one chord name becomes five different voicings, each with its own color.
What a chord actually is
A basic major chord is three notes: the root, the third, and the fifth. The third decides major or minor. Everything richer (sevenths, sixths, suspensions) is those same three notes plus one more color tone. When you see a chord as a small set of intervals instead of a fixed grip, moving it around the neck stops being memorization.
Chord Library
One chord, five places to play it. Pick a root and a flavor, and see every CAGED voicing laid out in order up the neck.
Reading a diagram
Strings run left to right from low E to high e, exactly as if the guitar were standing up in front of you. Dots are where your fingers go. A ringed dot is the root, the note the chord is named after. An × means don't play that string, and a small circle above the nut means play it open. The number on the right ("3fr") tells you which fret the diagram starts on, and a long pill across the strings is a barre.
Why five voicings?
These are the five CAGED forms, the same shapes and colors as the Fretboard Explorer. Every chord lives in all five places, and the cards are sorted by position so you can watch one chord climb the neck. Under each diagram you'll see the actual notes sounded and their role in the chord: R is the root, 3 the third, 5 the fifth, b7 the seventh, and so on.
How to use it
Learning a song and hating a chord change? Try the same chord in a different position; a nearer voicing often fixes the change. Playing with another guitarist? Grab a higher form so you're not stacked on the same frets. And if a full shape is a stretch, play just the strings your fingers can reach. Partial voicings are real voicings.
Same chord, climbing the neck. Notice how each form hands off to the next: the top of one voicing sits right where the next one begins. That chain is the whole CAGED system in action.
Open chords are shapes in one spot
The open chords you learned first are simply the CAGED shapes played at the nut, where open strings do some of the work for free. That free ring is why they sound so full, and why moving them up the neck as barre chords takes more effort: your finger now has to do what the nut used to.
Voicing families
The Chord Library below takes any chord and any quality and shows you all five CAGED voicings up the neck, with every note and interval labeled. Same chord, five personalities: the low thick one, the bright chimey one, the one that sits perfectly under a melody. Learning families instead of single grips is what lets you voice-lead smoothly between chords.
How to use this
Take a song you already play. Look up one of its chords here, then try a voicing you have never used for it, somewhere else on the neck. Notice how the feel changes without the harmony changing. That is arranging, and it starts with knowing where the notes live.
Open the full tool on its own page: Chord Library.
Related tools
- Chord Library: Any chord, nine flavors, five positions up the neck, with every note and interval labeled.
- Fretboard Explorer: See the five CAGED shapes tile the neck in any key, with chord-tone and scale overlays.
- Capo Calculator: Pick the key a song sounds in; get every capo position and shape family that plays it, with full chord translations.