Virtual Guitar

How to play it

A guitar is played with two hands doing different jobs: one holds a chord shape on the neck, the other strums. A screen gives you one gesture, so this page takes the first job. Tap a chord in the row above the neck and its shape goes down on the fretboard — a numbered dot for each finger, a ring at the nut for a string that rings open, a cross for a string the chord leaves out. Then drag across the strings to strum, in either direction, as fast or as slowly as you like. Tap a single string to pick it.

The row offers the chords of whichever Key is chosen, and Any chord holds any of the 108 on the guitar chord chart. Where a chord has more than one shape, Another shape walks through them — the open chord, then the barre chords up the neck.

Choose Notes and the hand lets go: every string then plays at whatever fret you press, which is how melodies are played and how the songs under the neck are written. Slide along a string and it speaks again at each fret you cross.

On a keyboard, 1 to 7 hold the chords of the key, Space strums down and Shift + Space strums up, 0 lets go, and Q W E R T Y pick the six strings from the high E down.

Your first three chords

G, C and D7 are the three chords of the key of G — the home chord, the step away from it and the one that pulls back home — and they are all open shapes: no barre, nothing above the 3rd fret. Thousands of songs need nothing else.

E minor and A minor are the next two, and with them you have every open chord in the keys of G and C. The full set — with each chord’s other shapes, its notes, and a microphone check that tells you which string of yours is wrong — is on the guitar chord chart; the chords that belong together are grouped by key, starting with the key of G.

The capo, and playing left-handed

Capo clamps the strings at a fret. The fret numbers and the chord shapes do not change — they are counted from the capo, the way capoed tab is written — but everything sounds higher, and each chord button tells you what its shape now sounds: with the capo at the 2nd fret, the G shape is an A chord. The songs move with it.

Left-handed mirrors the neck so the nut is on the right. The shapes are then drawn as a left-handed player sees them on their own guitar.

Acoustic and classical

Two guitars, the same notes. Acoustic is a steel-string flat-top played with a pick: bright, and it rings for seconds. Classical is nylon strings played with the fingers: rounder, softer at the start of the note and shorter. Both are tuned E–A–D–G–B–E.

What the sound is made of

Nothing here is a recording. Each string is modelled as what it is — a plucked string, a displacement travelling its own length and back and losing a little each time — and then passed through a model of the body: the air resonating through the soundhole near 100 Hz and the top plate’s own resonance near 200. Steel keeps more of its upper partials than nylon and rings longer, and a harder strum is brighter, not only louder.

Those body figures are typical ones for the kind of guitar, not a measurement of a particular instrument, because there is no such thing as the guitar body. It will not be mistaken for a recording of a good guitar, and it is not trying to be: it is here so a chord sounds like the chord and a tab sounds like the tune.

What it does not do

No string bends, hammer-ons or pull-offs, no palm muting, and no shapes of your own — a held chord is one of the shapes the page finds, or it is nothing. It is a fretboard for learning chords and picking out melodies, not a substitute for the instrument. When yours is in your hands and sounds wrong, the guitar tuner is one click away, and the tuning pages cover Drop D, open tunings and the rest.

Frequently asked questions