Five notes, four octaves, twenty-one strings
A modern guzheng is tuned to D major pentatonic — D, E, F♯, A, B — and then simply repeats it. String 21, the thickest and furthest away, is D2; five strings up is D3, five more is D4, and so on to the top string at D6. Once you have the five-note shape in your hand, you have the whole instrument: there is nothing to fret, nothing to stop, and every octave is laid out identically.
Those five notes are written 1 2 3 5 6 in the numbered notation Chinese music uses, and the gaps in that sequence are not an accident of the notation — there is no 4 and no 7 because there is no string for them. That is the single most important thing to understand about this instrument, and it leads directly to the technique below.
Pressing: how a five-note instrument plays every note
Here is the part that makes a guzheng a guzheng. The right hand plucks on one side of the bridges; the left hand presses down on the other side. Pressing stretches the string, raising its pitch — a little for vibrato, a semitone to reach the missing 4, a whole tone to reach the missing 7. A player is not working around the tuning when they do this. Half the expressive vocabulary of the instrument lives in that left hand, and the sliding, crying quality people recognise as “Chinese-sounding” is almost entirely this technique rather than the scale itself.
Drag downward on any string above and you will hear it. The further down you drag the sharper it goes, up to a whole tone; release and it settles back to the open pitch, the way lifting the left hand does. Try it on a 3 to find the 4, or on a 6 to find the 7 — those are the two presses that appear most in real music.
The bridges, and why the curve is not decoration
Every string crosses its own movable bridge before running on to its tuning peg. The bridge decides how much of the string is free to vibrate, so it sets the pitch as much as the peg does — and because lower strings need more length, the bridges step gradually along the instrument and trace the long arc you can see above.
This is also why guzheng players change key by moving bridges rather than by retuning every peg. Sliding a handful of them shifts the whole pentatonic set into a neighbouring key while every playing technique stays identical. The key selector here does the same job: all 21 strings move together, so the note numbers keep their meaning and any tab written in them still plays.
Reading the string numbers
| String | Note | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | D6 | Highest and thinnest, nearest the player. |
| 8 | A4 | Concert A — the one string you can check against a piano, a tuning fork or another instrument without any reference at all. |
| 11 | D4 | The middle D, and the anchor most players count outward from. |
| 16 | D3 | One octave below the middle; the top of the bass register. |
| 21 | D2 | Lowest and thickest, furthest from the player. |
The numbering runs opposite to pitch, which catches out nearly everyone who comes to the instrument from a guitar or a piano. Most instruments mark one reference string — usually a middle D or the A — with a coloured wrap where it crosses its bridge, and counting from there is faster than counting from either end.
Songs
The library below is public domain — traditional melodies and classical pieces free for anyone to publish — and it is filtered to what this instrument can genuinely play. Mo Li Hua (茉莉花), the Jiangsu folk song from the Qianlong era that is probably the best-known Chinese melody in the world, is pentatonic throughout and sits on the guzheng perfectly. Several other songs in the collection do not appear here at all, and the reason is the one from the top of this page: they need a 4 or a 7, and the instrument has no string for those. Play them on the online kalimba, which is tuned to a full major scale — or play them here and press for the missing notes yourself, which is what a guzheng player would do.
For anything else, the editor takes a tab in the numbered notation above, plays it, and turns it into a link. The notes travel inside the link itself and are never uploaded here.
When the real one is out of tune
Twenty-one strings drift, and they drift unevenly — the top few fastest, because they carry the most tension for their length. The guzheng tuner listens through your microphone and names whatever it hears with a cents readout, string by string, and covers the part this page cannot: which peg to turn, when to move a bridge instead, and why a string that reads perfectly can still sound rough against its neighbours. If you are moving bridges to change key, that is the page to have open while you do it.
Questions
Why are there no F or C strings? Is something missing?
Nothing is missing — that is the tuning. A guzheng is tuned to a five-note scale, D–E–F♯–A–B in its standard tuning, repeating across every octave. In the numbered notation Chinese music uses, those are 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6; the 4 and the 7 are simply not given strings of their own. That is not a limitation the instrument works around, it is the sound of the instrument. When a player does need those two notes, they press the string down on the far side of its bridge, which stretches it sharp — so the 4 is a pressed 3, and the 7 is a pressed 6. Drag downward on any string here and you will hear the same thing happen.
How do I bend a note?
Press a string and drag downward without moving sideways. The further you drag, the sharper it goes, up to a whole tone; let go and it falls back to the open pitch, exactly as lifting your left hand does on the real instrument. Sideways movement is reserved for the glissando, so the gesture commits to whichever direction you move first — that way a slightly diagonal sweep still sounds every string instead of bending one.
Which string is which? They are not numbered the way I expected.
Guzheng strings are numbered from the highest, nearest the player, downward: string 1 is the thinnest and highest (D6), string 21 is the thickest and lowest (D2). So the numbers run opposite to pitch, which catches everyone out at first. The useful landmarks are string 8, which is concert A and the easiest to check against another instrument, and strings 21, 16, 11 and 6, which are the D at the bottom of each octave.
What is the curve the bridges make?
Each string crosses its own movable bridge — often called a goose foot for its shape — and the bridge sets how much of the string is free to vibrate. Lower strings need more length, so their bridges sit further along the instrument, and the result is the long sweeping arc that is the most recognisable thing about a guzheng. It is also why tuning and key changes are the same job: sliding a bridge changes the pitch, which is what a player does to move the whole instrument into another key.
Can I change the key?
Yes, and it is what guzheng players actually do rather than retuning from scratch. Moving a handful of bridges shifts the whole pentatonic set into a neighbouring key — G, C and F are the common ones — while everything about the playing technique stays identical. The key selector here does the same thing: every string moves together, so the note numbers, and therefore every tab written in them, stay correct.
Does this work for a 13, 16 or 18-string guzheng?
The pattern does. Smaller and older sizes use the same repeating five-note run, just across fewer strings and over a narrower range, so anything you learn about the layout carries over. Only the 21-string is drawn here, because that is the size the site has a fully reviewed note chart for — guessing which note a 16-string starts on would be inventing a fact about a real instrument, and there is a firm rule against that here.
Does it sound like a real guzheng?
It is synthesised rather than recorded, and modelled on what the string actually is: a steel core under tension, plucked with a hard pick, whose overtones follow the ordinary harmonic series with a slight sharpening in the upper partials because real wire resists bending. That last detail is small and is most of what separates "a wire" from "a synth". A recording of a fine instrument in a good room would have more character; what synthesis buys is that the first note sounds the instant you touch a string with nothing to download, and that bending produces a genuinely continuous pitch rather than a resampled approximation of one.