chords-db

This is a javascript database of string instruments chords. Open, free to use, easily improved with more chords. Contributions are welcomed, still a lot of chords (and instruments) missing. Use the pull request feature of Github to add your desired chords if you want to contribute.

Take a look at the chords database of an instrument to understand the schema used to register new chords. For example, let's take a look at the Dsus2 chords of guitar. We can see this information in the D/sus2.js file:

export default {
  key: 'D',
  suffix: 'sus2',
  positions: [{
    frets: '0320xx',
    fingers: '031000'
  },
  {
    frets: '55775x',
    fingers: '114310',
    barres: 5,
    capo: true
  }]
}

Each position define a new chord variation of the Dsus2 chord. We must define the frets needed to obtain the chord in the respective strings. We can define too the fingers information for easy reading of the chord. If the chord need to barre some string, we will define if in the barre field. If you want the barre be represented with capo, you can define the "capo" property too.

Forked from tombatossals/chords-db for the Obsidian Chord Sheets plugin. Changes and data sources:

• Added typings
• Guitar and ukulele corrections taken from tabsy-gr/chords-db (MIT) in October 2026: wrong and copied shapes fixed, mislabelled chords renamed, broken and duplicate voicings removed, implied barres declared, impossible fingerings fixed, prefer root in the bass. Every change is explained in their UPSTREAM-DIFF.md.
• Guitar 7b13 shapes from chord.farm (October 2024 – they never answered my request for permission. If you are chord.farm and would like this to be removed, please contact me).
• Ukulele in D tuning (A D F# B, from MostFrabjous, October 2024) and baritone ukulele (D G B E, from eviv-java, December 2024) are the ukulele shapes transposed, now derived from the ukulele data at build time (transposeChords in src/tools.js).
• Mandolin (G D A E): converted in March 2024 from mando.py of starenka/chordata (2014, no licence), a generated database. Cleaned up in October 2026: reordered the chord shapes so that easier shapes come first, remove duplicate and invalid suffixes, declared barres, and added missing shapes and fixes for impossible or awkward fingerings from ChordPro.

This project is using yarn as package manager, so all the basic command related to the project lifecycle are bound to it. Three basic commands

yarn install
yarn build

Generates a new version of the library when new chords are added.

yarn test

Make some testing of the new added chords. Very useful to detect basic mistakes.

All this information is packed in a JSON library, that you can use to render visually with a utility able to parse this information.

You can take a look of the current state of the database with this SVG rendering tool: