Guitar: What the Numbers Turn Into

The chord reference for this reader. Pick a root, then any of 62 qualities, and get the shapes plus the thing a chord chart never prints: which digit stands for this chord once somebody counts off in a key.

A guitarist reads a shape per number — the one hand position that has to be found before the bar arrives, which is why a guitarist reads a chart one bar ahead of everybody else. The chart hands over a degree and nothing else, so the hand has to arrive at a whole shape from a single digit, and it has to have arrived before the bar does.

Every shape below is drawn for EADGBE, 6 strings, open shapes first and movable ones after them, and each one plays back — because the fastest way to check that a number was read right is to hear it.