Strings

How to play

• Click or drag across frets to pluck individual notes.
• Pick an Instrument at the top — Guitar, Bass, Ukulele, Banjo, or Mandolin. Each one swaps the tuning, fret count, and sound list. Your last-used sound is remembered per instrument.
• Strum Bar (Guitar / Ukulele / Banjo / Mandolin): the row of named chord pads at the top of the chord builder is the fastest way to play a song. Every chord you play (via the matrix below or the + input) gets pinned here, so a progression like Em → A → Em → A is one tap per change once both chords are on the bar. Pads persist across sessions per-instrument, capped at 8 (oldest falls off). Hover or tap-and-hold a pad to reveal the × remove button.
• Chord builder (Guitar / Ukulele / Banjo / Mandolin): set Quality (Major / m7 / sus4 / aug / dim / mMaj7 / 6 / m6 / m7♭5 / …) and Shape — those just configure the chord without playing. Tapping a Root button strums it (and pins it to the Strum Bar above for one-tap recall later). The five enharmonic roots show both spellings ( C♯ / D♭ , D♯ / E♭ , F♯ / G♭ , G♯ / A♭ , A♯ / B♭ ) — the + name input also accepts either form ( Bb7 and A#7 land on the same chord). Guitar and ukulele voicings (with textbook fingerings) for the seven core qualities come from the open chords-db dataset; the extended qualities (aug / dim / dim7 / m7♭5 / mMaj7 / 6 / m6) and banjo / mandolin chords use an algorithmic finder that searches three position windows (open / mid / high) for each chord.
• Reading a chord shape: see the legend row at the bottom of the chord builder. Finger numbers follow the universal string-instrument convention — 1 = index, 2 = middle, 3 = ring, 4 = pinky — used in every guitar, ukulele, banjo, and mandolin method book. The red disc shows the chord's root note name (e.g. C for a C major chord) with the fretting finger number as a small superscript (e.g. C₃ = press the C with your ring finger).
• Strings (low to high): E A D G B E . The thicker strings are toward the bottom. On narrow screens the neck scrolls horizontally — swipe past the inlay dots to reach the upper register.