Chord finder
Pick a chord; see it on a keyboard and hear it.
Every chord worth knowing, in every key — with the notes named, the intervals labelled, the shape lit up on a keyboard, and a button to hear it. Twenty-three chord types from a plain major triad to a thirteenth, each with its inversions, and each one showing which keys it belongs to.
The plain, bright one. Three notes, nothing hidden.
- C1
- E3
- G5
Click any key to hear it on its own. Inversions play the same chord with a different note at the bottom — same harmony, different colour, and usually a much smaller jump from the chord before it.
Or go the other way
Found something on a keyboard and don't know what it is? Click the notes you're holding and it will tell you — including the other names the same notes go by.
The plain, bright one. Three notes, nothing hidden.
The same notes can have more than one right name — C E G A is a C6 if the C is at the bottom and an Am7 if the A is. The reading with the lowest note as its root comes first, because that is the one the ear picks.
How chords are built
Stack every other note of a scale and you have a chord. Start on C in C major and take every second note — C, E, G — and that is a major triad. Do the same starting on D and you get D, F, A: a minor chord, because the gap from D to F is a semitone smaller than the gap from C to E. That single semitone is the entire difference between happy and sad, and everything else in harmony is a variation on it.
Keep stacking and the chords grow: a fourth note makes a seventh, a fifth makes a ninth, and so on up through elevenths and thirteenths. Each addition makes the chord richer and less stable — which is why jazz lives at the top of that pile and punk lives at the bottom.
What the symbols mean
- C — major. Nothing after the letter means major.
- Cm — minor. Sometimes written Cmin or C−.
- C7 — a dominant seventh: major, plus a flattened seventh. The blues chord.
- Cmaj7 — major with the natural seventh. Soft and floating; not the same chord as C7, and mixing them up is the most common chart-reading mistake there is.
- Csus4 — the third is replaced by the fourth, so it's neither major nor minor until it resolves.
- C/E — a C chord with E in the bass. That is what the inversion buttons do.
Why inversions matter
A chord is the same chord whichever order its notes are in, but not the same sound. Playing C–E–G then F–A–C means your hand jumps; playing C–E–G then C–F–A hardly moves, and the music flows instead of lurching. That is voice leading, and it is most of what separates a chord chart from an arrangement.
Where to use them
PS-PRG sequences chords in roman numerals and re-voices them when the key changes, PS-PAD turns them into long swells, and PS-CHD strums them like an autoharp. If you want to know which chords belong together, the scale finder lists every chord in a key, and the Academy lesson on chords explains why those seven and no others.