Bass Guitar Chord Chart

How to use this chart

1. Pick your bass, then the string the root sits on. Four-string or five, and whether you are rooting the chord on the E string or higher. On a 4-string, rooting on the A string puts half these shapes out of reach, and the chart will tell you which ones and why.
2. Pick a root note. Every shape redraws in that key, at that position, with the real note names on it.
3. Read the verdict under each diagram. Clear, Thick or Muddy. It is not a style opinion, it is arithmetic: each shape is checked against the arranging table that says how low a given interval can sit before the ear stops separating the notes.
4. Now change the position. Tap the second chip to move the same root up an octave. Nothing about the harmony changes, and the verdicts change completely. That is the whole lesson of bass chords in one tap.
5. Tick the shapes you want and print them. You get a vector PDF of exactly those diagrams, in your key, at your position, on your bass, left-handed if you play that way.

Why this chart is different

Search for a bass chord chart and you get two kinds of page, and neither of them is complete. There are the charts, which draw the shapes and say nothing about where to play them. And there are the lessons, which explain that bass chords turn to mud down low and then do not give you a chart. The most important fact about a bass chord is missing from every chart that shows it.

• Every shape is checked for mud, not just drawn. Each one carries the lowest pitch at which it actually rings clear, and a live verdict for where you have it right now. Nothing else on the first page of results computes this.
• It answers the question that matters. Not "what does an Am7 look like" but "will this Am7 sound like an Am7 down here?" Usually the answer is no, and the chart tells you exactly how far up to move it.
• Four-string and five-string, in every key. Not one printed key with a transposition table. Pick B on a five-string and the low B is right there with the honest verdict attached.
• The shapes are honest about what they leave out. Almost every bass voicing drops a note, usually the fifth, and this chart says so on the card instead of implying you are playing a complete chord.
• Free, printable, and embeddable. The two shop-bought charts above this one in the results are laminated cards at about six dollars. This is a vector PDF of only the shapes you picked, and you can put the whole tool on your own site.
• The shapes are verified, not just typed. Every three-note voicing is fed on each build to the separately written engine behind our chord identifier, which has to arrive at the same chord name from the notes alone.

How it works (the register maths)

A bass in standard tuning is E A D G, and every string is a perfect fourth above the one below it. The open low E sounds at 41.2 Hz, a full octave under a guitar's low E. That octave is the entire problem with bass chords, and it is why a shape lifted off a guitar chart does not work.

Low notes carry a great deal of energy in their lower harmonics. Stack two of them close together and those harmonics collide faster than the ear can separate them, and what should be a chord arrives as a rumble. Arrangers have a table for this, the low interval limits, which gives the lowest pitch at which each interval is still heard as two notes rather than one muddy one. This chart runs every pair of notes in every shape against it.

for every pair of notes in the shape:
    deficit = lowest allowed pitch for that interval - the lower note

worst deficit ≤ 0 semitones   Clear
worst deficit 1 to 4            Thick
worst deficit 5 or more         Muddy

perfect 5th   allowed from B♭1     minor 3rd   allowed from C3
major 3rd     allowed from B♭2     major 10th  allowed from B♭1
octave        no limit at all

Read those four rows and the whole of bass chord playing falls out of them. A fifth is allowed an octave lower than a third, which is why the root-and-fifth dyad is the one bass chord that works everywhere. An octave has no limit, so it works literally anywhere. And a major third is muddy below B♭2, but a major tenth, which is the same two notes pulled an octave apart, is clean from B♭1: a full octave lower. That single fact is why bassists play tenths instead of thirds, and this chart is the first one that shows you the number behind the advice.

The consequences are blunt. On a 4-string, a close major triad does not ring clear until the eighteenth fret. A minor one does not clear until the twentieth. The spread version of the same chord clears at the sixth. Those are not opinions about taste, they are where the table puts them.

Three ways players actually use this

The one shape to learn first

Set the root to A on the E string and look at the major tenth. Two notes, two fingers, a fret apart, and it says what a full triad says. It is clean from B♭1, which is the sixth fret, so at A on the fifth fret it reads Thick and at A on the seventeenth it reads Clear. Learn that one shape in every key before you learn anything else on this page, and you will be able to play a chord anywhere a song asks for one.

Why your triads sound like a lorry

Tick the close major triad and the spread major triad, then listen to both at the fifth fret. Same three notes, same key, and one of them is unusable. The close shape stacks a major third at the bottom, thirteen semitones under where a major third is allowed to sit; the spread shape puts a fifth down there instead and throws the third up an octave. If you have ever wondered why the guitar chord you copied does not work on bass, that is the answer, and it is one tap to hear it.

Jazz changes without the fifth

Switch to the shell voicings. Root, the note that sets the quality, and the seventh, with the fifth thrown away because it carries no information in a seventh chord. All three clear at the thirteenth fret on a 4-string E string, which is exactly where you see jazz bassists comping them. Below the twelfth they are honest mud, and no amount of technique fixes that. If your rig is turning even the clean ones to porridge, that is worth checking too: see our roundup of the best bass amps, because low-mid definition is the whole job there.

Frequently asked questions

What chords can you play on a bass guitar?

All of them, and most of them badly. Physically a bass will hold any shape a guitar will, but the instrument sits an octave lower, so anything tightly stacked turns to mud. In practice the chords bassists actually use are two-note shapes (root and fifth, root and octave, and above all the major and minor tenth), spread triads with the third thrown up an octave, and seventh shells that drop the fifth entirely. All 19 of those are on the chart above, each with the pitch it starts working at.

What are the easiest bass chords to learn?

The octave and the root-and-fifth, in that order. Two fingers, no ambiguity, and the octave is the one shape on the chart with no low interval limit at all, so it works on the open E and everywhere above it. After those, the major and minor tenth: also two fingers, and they are the shapes that let you state major or minor without a third note. A beginner who owns those four shapes in every key can cover most songs.

What is the 3 fret rule on bass?

It usually means the left-hand position bassists borrow from double bass: your hand covers three frets rather than four, with index, middle, and ring plus pinky working together on the third. Bass frets are much wider than guitar frets, and down at the first position a one-finger-per-fret stretch injures people. It matters for chords because it caps how wide a shape you can hold low down, which is a second reason the crowded shapes on this chart are not worth chasing at the bottom of the neck. This chart never asks for a span wider than five frets, and says so when a shape will not fit.

Is there a printable PDF of this bass chord chart?

Yes, free, with no email required. Tick the shapes you want and press Printable PDF, and you get a vector chart of exactly those diagrams in your key, at your position, on your bass, with the finger numbers, the note names, and each shape's clean-from pitch. It respects the left-handed setting. Because the diagrams are drawn as vectors rather than saved as pictures, it prints sharp at any size.

Does this work for a 5-string bass?

Yes. Switch the chart to 5-string and it retunes to B E A D G, adds the low B as a root option, and redraws every diagram with five strings. It is worth doing even if you play a four, because the low B makes the register problem obvious: a shape that is merely thick on the E string is often flatly muddy down there. The extra string buys range, not permission. If you are shopping for one, the five-string is covered in our best beginner bass guitars roundup.

Related tools

• Chord Identifier. Found a shape that is not on this chart? Tap the notes in and get its name, spelled properly.
• Chord Transposer. A chart in a key that puts everything in the mud? Move the whole song somewhere kinder.
• Interactive Circle of Fifths. Which chords belong together in a key, and why a bass line keeps landing on the same four.
• Note Frequency Chart. The hertz behind the register argument on this page. The open low E is 41.2 Hz.
• Blank Sheet Music & Bass TAB. Printable bass TAB paper to write these shapes into a real bass line.
• Browse all free musician's tools by Julian →

Gear that makes bass chords work

The suggestions beside your result change with what the chart is telling you, because a player stuck in the mud at the first fret needs something different from one comping shells at the twelfth. Three things genuinely matter. An amp with real low-mid definition, because chords expose a weak speaker instantly and a shape the chart calls Clear can still arrive as porridge through a small practice combo. A clip-on tuner, because two notes a few cents apart beat against each other and sound exactly like mud even when the voicing is fine, and bassists blame the voicing every time. And the instrument itself: a narrow, fast neck makes these shapes reachable, which is most of what separates the entries in our best beginner bass guitars roundup.

Sources & methodology

• Tuning and pitch. Standard tuning, A4 = 440 Hz, sounding pitch. A 4-string bass is E1 A1 D2 G2 and a 5-string adds B0. The note a string sounds is open string + fret in semitones; playback frequency is 440 · 2^((m−69)/12), so the open low E is 41.20 Hz and the low B on a five is 30.87 Hz.
• Chord construction and spelling. Tones come from interval formulas and are spelled by diatonic letter step, so a major tenth of A is C♯ and never D♭. Reference: musictheory.net.
• The low interval limits. The 17-row table is the Berklee lower-interval-limit chart, which gives the lowest pitch at which each interval is heard distinctly: unison and octave unlimited, perfect fifth from B♭1, major third from B♭2, minor third from C3, minor tenth from C2, and so on. See the Berklee table, Robin Hoffmann's note on applying it, and the Sweetwater glossary entry. Following Hoffmann, every interval inside a shape is checked and the worst one sets the verdict.
• One row is ours, and it is marked. The published table stops at the minor tenth. Every compound interval in it sits exactly one octave below its simple form, so we extend that rule by one step to put the major tenth at B♭1, an octave below the major third. Some charts instead call the major tenth unlimited; ours takes the stricter reading, which means the tenth shapes on this page are rated a little more harshly than they might be elsewhere.
• The bands. At or above the limit is Clear. One to four semitones below is Thick, the width taken from Hoffmann's own worked example, which treats an interval a perfect fourth below its limit as the clearly muddy case. Five or more is Muddy.
• Verification. 19 shapes are checked on every build by a fixture suite of over three thousand assertions, written by hand from the published table rather than generated from the code. Each shape's clean-from pitch is re-derived from the raw table; each fingering must sound exactly the root plus its intervals, so a fingering can never quietly change the harmony; every three-note voicing in all twelve keys is fed to the independently written engine behind our chord identifier, which must name the same chord from the notes alone; and every shape that fits is drawn across both basses, every root string and the whole neck. If any of it drifts, the site does not build.

The low interval limits are a guideline arrangers use, not a law. A distorted rock tone, a doubled guitar part, or a sparse mix will all carry a voicing lower than this chart calls clean, and a dense arrangement will punish one that clears it comfortably. Plenty of great bass playing ignores the table on purpose. Use the verdicts to understand why something sounds thick, then use your ears. Reviewed by Julian Reyes, MM (Berklee). About Julian · Last reviewed August 30, 2026.

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