Guitar chord finder — get the chords from any guitar recording.
For guitarists learning a cover, transcribing a riff, or building a chord sheet for jam night. Upload an MP3 or WAV — get a chord chart with timing, key and tempo on a timeline, ready to play along with or export.
See any chord on the fretboard.
Pick a chord to see where it sits in standard EADGBE tuning. These are the open-position shapes most songs lean on — the same chords ChordSonic detects when you upload a guitar track and want the chart instead of the shape.
Tap a chord to see the shape on the fretboard — these are the open-position chords most songs are built from.
Why finding chords on guitar is its own problem.
On guitar a chord is half harmony, half geography. The same G major lives all over the neck — open position, an E-shape barre at the third fret, an A-shape barre at the tenth, a triad on the top three strings, a partial voicing under a melody. A chord finder that works from audio cannot see your hand; it hears the pitches and reports the harmony. So an open G and a barre G come back as the same chart symbol, even though they feel like completely different shapes to play. That is the right call — the chart names the chord, and you choose where on the neck to put it.
Then there is the power chord. Rock and metal rhythm guitar leans on two-note root-and-fifth shapes that deliberately leave out the third — and the third is the note that decides major from minor. When that information is not in the recording, no analysis can recover it; the honest answer is the root, and a good chord finder will say so rather than invent a quality. Add a capo and the picture shifts again: a fingered C shape with a capo at the second fret sounds a D, and the chart correctly reports D, because that is the chord a listener hears regardless of the shape your fretting hand is making.
Tuning is the next twist. Standard EADGBE is only the starting point. Drop D lowers the sixth string for heavier root notes; DADGAD, open G and open D rearrange the open strings into drones and partial chords; half-step-down tuning shifts everything by a semitone. Because the pipeline does absolute pitch detection rather than matching against a tuning, it reports the chords that are actually sounding — so a half-step-down recording comes back labelled in the keys you actually hear, not the shapes you fretted. The shape-to-name mapping is the player's job; the chord names are ours.
Finally, articulation changes the signal. A clean fingerpicked passage spreads the chord tones out in time, so the harmony arrives one note at a time rather than as a single struck block — great for clarity, but it means the analysis has to gather a chord from an arpeggio. A hard strum stacks all six strings at once with a percussive attack. Distortion and overdrive pile on extra harmonics that blur chord tones into overtones. Each of these is a different problem for chord detection, and guitar throws all of them at the same engine — sometimes in the same song.
From guitar audio to a chord chart in three steps.
We report the chord (e.g. “G”), not the shape or the fretting you used. That is a deliberate scope choice — full tab transcription is a separate, harder problem. What you get is the harmony layer, fast and exportable.
- 01
Upload your guitar recording
Drag in an MP3 or WAV — a solo acoustic take, an electric riff into an interface, a full-band mix, or a phone recording of you working out a part. Up to 50 MB and roughly 10 minutes per file. No installs, no account required for your first analysis.
- 02
ChordSonic’s pipeline analyses the audio
The pipeline isolates the harmonic content, tracks the beat grid, estimates the key, and matches what it hears against a chord vocabulary. On guitar-heavy material the cleanest signal usually comes from sustained, clearly-voiced chords; palm-muted power chords and dense distortion give it less to work with. The whole job runs in seconds to a minute or two depending on length.
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Get a chord chart with timing and key
Output is a timeline of chord blocks with start and end times, the detected musical key, and the tempo in BPM. Scrub through to verify each chord by ear, transpose the chart up or down to suit your capo or voice, and export to TXT, CSV or JSON for your DAW, a chord-sheet generator or a printout for the band.
Four things guitarists actually use it for.
Learning covers
If you learn by ear from records and live videos, you know the rewind-and-guess cycle. Pull the audio, upload it, and start the cycle most of the way done. You still verify the ambiguous bars by ear — that is unavoidable — but the chord skeleton is already on the timeline and aligned to the beat, so you spend your time playing instead of pausing.
Transcribing riffs and progressions
Drop in a track and recover the changes underneath the riff. The chart won’t hand you the tab, but it nails the harmonic frame — the I–IV–V, the borrowed chord in the bridge, the key the solo sits in — which is exactly the scaffold you need before you work out the fretting note by note.
Building chord sheets
Get a chord chart you can hand to a bandmate, drop into a DAW as marker text, or paste into a lyric sheet. Export to TXT, CSV or JSON and feed it straight into a chord-sheet generator. This is the use case where ChordSonic earns its keep for working guitarists who don’t want to transcribe their own ideas by hand.
Jam and rehearsal prep
Someone calls a tune for the next session and there is no chart anywhere online. Upload the recording, get the progression and the key, transpose it to a guitar-friendly key or to match the singer, and walk into rehearsal already knowing the changes instead of fumbling them in real time.
Honest limits.
Recovering chords from a guitar audio signal is a hard problem and we want to be honest about it. On clean, clearly-voiced guitar — acoustic strumming, lightly-driven electric — accuracy on common major, minor and seventh chords lands in a useful range. On heavy distortion, dense full-band mixes, or extended jazz voicings, accuracy drops, sometimes considerably. The timeline always lets you scrub and correct, so think of the result as a strong first draft, not a finished transcription.
Two guitar-specific cases deserve a callout. Power chords carry no third, so the pipeline cannot tell major from minor and will report the root — that is the audio being ambiguous, not the analysis failing. And extended jazz voicings (9ths, 11ths, 13ths, altered dominants, quartal shapes) pack so much harmonic information into a few strings that the chart may simplify a lush voicing down to its nearest common chord. If you are transcribing a clean comp, that is usually close enough to build on; if you need every tension named exactly, you will be correcting by ear.
We also report chord names, not tab. You get the harmony with timing — chord blocks, key, tempo, exportable to TXT, CSV and JSON — but not fret-by-fret tablature, not the specific shapes, not picking patterns or strum direction. For note-level tab you want a dedicated transcription product; for the chord skeleton and the key, this is the right tool. Many guitarists use both side by side: ChordSonic for the bar-by-bar harmony, tab for the exact fretting they want to nail down.
Guitar chord finder, answered
Does it tell me which chord shape to play — open or barre?
No, and that is deliberate. ChordSonic reports the chord — G, C, Em, A7 — not the shape your hand makes to play it. An open G in first position, a third-fret E-shape barre at the G, and a partial three-string voicing high up the neck are all reported as G, because that is the harmony in the recording. Every guitarist has their own shape vocabulary, and the same chord can be voiced a dozen ways across the neck. Read the chord name and reach for the shape that fits your hand, the song, and the position you want to play in. If you need the exact fretting and fingering, that is tab transcription, which is a separate, harder problem.
What about capo, drop D, or alternate tunings?
ChordSonic analyses the audio at its actual sounding pitch, so it does not need to know how you got there. If you capo at the second fret and finger an open C shape, the recording sounds a D and the chart says D — which is correct, that is the chord a listener hears. Same with drop D, DADGAD, open G or any other tuning: the pipeline reports the chords that are sounding, not the shapes or the tuning that produced them. If you would rather see the chart in capo-relative shape names, transpose the result down by the capo's fret count and read the shapes off that. The tuning is invisible to the analysis; only the pitches matter.
How well does it handle distorted or overdriven guitar?
It is one of the harder cases, and we would rather be honest than oversell it. Distortion adds layers of harmonics and intermodulation that were not in the dry signal, which blurs the line between chord tones and overtones — and heavy palm-muted power chords often carry no third at all, so the pipeline literally cannot tell major from minor because that information is not in the audio. Clean and lightly-driven guitar is well within range. For a wall of high-gain rhythm guitar, expect more correction work, and expect power chords to come back labelled by their root rather than as full major or minor chords. That is the recording being ambiguous, not the analysis guessing wrong.
Can I find chords for a full-band song, not just solo guitar?
Yes, and often better than you would expect, because the pipeline runs source separation before it matches chords — so a full mix with drums, bass and vocals gets cleaned up first. Accuracy is generally lower than on solo guitar because the harmony is now spread across several instruments, and some chord tones live in the bass or keys rather than the guitar. If guitar is the dominant harmonic instrument, results stay close to solo-guitar quality. If it is buried under synths and stacked vocals, expect to verify more of the chart by ear.
Is there a guitar-specific version of ChordSonic?
No — and on purpose. There is one ChordSonic pipeline and it works on any audio. This page exists because guitarists search for chord finders in their own language, and the use cases for a guitar player — learning a cover, transcribing a riff, building a chord sheet for jam night — are worth talking about specifically. But under the hood it is the same chord detection a pianist or producer uses. Guitar is the recording, not a special mode.
Drop a guitar track. Get the chords.
MP3 or WAV, up to 50 MB. Chord chart, key and tempo in seconds. Free, no credit card, exportable to TXT, CSV and JSON.