Blank Guitar Chord Chart

How to make your chord sheet

1. Pick the instrument. Guitar is the default. Seven-string, four- and five-string bass, ukulele, banjo and mandolin each redraw the grid with the right number of strings and the right open-string names.
2. Choose how many boxes you want. Tap a preset for a common grid, or drag the columns and rows sliders. Leave rows at "Fill page" and the sheet packs in as many as will fit cleanly.
3. Set the fret span and position. Three to seven frets per box. Leave the start fret at the nut for open chords, or move it up the neck and each box prints its position marker instead of a nut.
4. Flip it left-handed if you play lefty. The strings mirror and so do the names, which is the part most printable charts skip.
5. Type your chord names. Paste or type a list and the names print above the boxes in order, turning a blank sheet into a practice worksheet. Leave it empty for a ruled line to write on.
6. Download, print or share. Get a crisp PDF, print straight from the browser, or copy a link that reopens this exact sheet for a student or bandmate.

Why this blank chord chart is different

Search for a blank guitar chord chart and you get PDFs. Someone decided once how many boxes go on a page and how many frets go in a box, and that is the sheet you get. If it does not match what you are working on, your options are to print it anyway or keep looking. A few sites work around this by publishing six or nine separate files, one per layout.

• The layout is yours, not a file someone saved. Columns, rows, frets per box and fret position all redraw as you move them, so you print the sheet you needed rather than the nearest one available.
• Left-handed charts that are actually mirrored. Static PDFs cannot flip, so lefty players are usually handed a chart with the string names removed and told it works either way. Here the grid mirrors and the names come with it.
• Your chord names, printed. Type a list and each box gets its name. That is the difference between blank paper and a worksheet you can hand a student, and it is the thing people currently pay for on template marketplaces.
• Seven instruments, one page. Guitar, seven-string, bass in four and five, ukulele, banjo and mandolin, each with its own string count and standard tuning rather than a guitar grid with lines deleted.
• Free to embed. Teachers and bloggers can drop the whole generator onto a lesson page, which no other chart on this search offers at all.

How the sheet is drawn

A chord box is a small piece of the fretboard seen head-on. The vertical lines are strings, the horizontal lines are frets, and the thick line across the top is the nut, so the box you are looking at is the first few frets of the neck. The lowest-pitched string sits on the left, which is why a right-handed guitar box reads E A D G B E from left to right. Move the start fret up the neck and the nut becomes an ordinary fret line, with a small marker beside the box telling you which fret you are on.

Left-handed is a genuine mirror, not a rotated picture: the string order reverses, so the same guitar box reads E B G D A E, and the position marker moves to the other side where you can still read it.

Each instrument brings its own grid. Bass gets four lines, or five with a low B. Ukulele gets four, tuned G C E A with the re-entrant high G. Mandolin is drawn as four lines, one per double course, which is how mandolin chord diagrams are conventionally written. Banjo gets five, tuned g D G B D with the drone leftmost — and because that fifth string physically starts at the fifth fret, there is an optional setting that draws it that way instead of running it the full length of the box.

The page itself is real paper geometry: US Letter at 612 × 792 points, A4 at 595.28 × 841.89, with the boxes sized to fill the printable area rather than floating in the middle of it. Because the preview and the PDF are generated from the same measurements, what you see is what prints. The one thing the tool cannot control is your printer dialog: choose 100% or "Actual size," not "Fit to page," or every grid shrinks a few percent.

Three ways players use it

A worksheet for a lesson

Type the chords you are assigning — say G, C, D, Em, Am — turn on the finger-number row and the song header, and you have a named worksheet a student fills in themselves. Writing the shape is what makes it stick, which is why this beats handing over a finished chart. If they are just starting, our guide to guitar chords for beginners covers the shapes worth putting on that first sheet.

Logging voicings you work out yourself

Found a voicing up the neck you want to keep? Set the start fret to where you are playing, take four or five frets, and print a page of position boxes. Over a few weeks that becomes a personal chord book of grips you actually use, rather than a dictionary of ones you don't.

Alternate tunings and other instruments

A blank grid is tuning-agnostic, which makes it the right paper for drop D, open G or anything you invent — turn the string names off and write your own. Switching to bass, ukulele or banjo redraws the grid properly, so you are not crossing out lines on a guitar sheet. Planning a tuning change first? Check the pull with our string tension calculator.

Frequently asked questions

How many chord boxes should a page have?

Most printed blank charts land between 20 and 25 boxes on a US Letter page, which leaves enough room to draw dots and write finger numbers without crowding. Use fewer, larger boxes — a two or three column sheet — when the shapes are complicated or the sheet is for a beginner, and more when you are cataloguing voicings you already know. The generator goes from a single jumbo box up to more than fifty.

How do you read a blank chord chart once you've filled it in?

Dots on the grid are fingers: the column tells you the string, the row tells you the fret. A number under the box says which finger to use, an o above a string means play it open, and an x means don't play it at all. A thick line across the top is the nut; if there's a number like "5fr" beside the box instead, the top line is the fifth fret.

Is there a left-handed blank guitar chord chart?

Yes — switch handedness to Left and the whole grid mirrors, including the string names, so the low E sits on the right where a left-handed player sees it. Most printable charts avoid the problem by leaving the string names off entirely and telling lefties the sheet works either way.

Can I use this for bass, ukulele, banjo or mandolin?

Yes. Each one redraws the grid with its own string count and standard tuning: bass in four (E A D G) or five (B E A D G), ukulele G C E A, banjo g D G B D, and mandolin as four course lines, G D A E. Nothing is a guitar grid with lines removed.

Is it free to print and use with students?

Yes. The sheets are free to print and use at home, in a studio or in a classroom, with no signup and no watermark, and you can embed the generator itself on a lesson page at no cost.

Related tools

• Beginner Guitar Chord Chart — the 26 open chords worth filling your first blank sheet with, easiest first.
• Barre Chord Chart — every root and type worked out, for the position boxes further up the neck.
• Chord Identifier — found a shape by accident? Tap it out and get its real name to write in the box.
• Blank Sheet Music — staff, tab and notation-over-tab paper when you need lines instead of grids.
• Browse all free musician's tools by Julian →

Gear for filling one in

The tool suggests a few items under the sheet and swaps them with the instrument you picked, for a simple reason: a chord you write down is only worth keeping if you can hear whether it works. Tune first — a clip-on tuner settles that in seconds — and use a soft pencil, because voicings get erased and rewritten more than anything else on the page. If your strings are months old, new ones will tell you more about a voicing than another hour of practice; our acoustic string roundup covers what to put on. Still choosing an instrument to write for? Start with the best beginner acoustic guitars or the best beginner bass guitars.

Sources & methodology

• Diagram conventions: vertical lines as strings, horizontal lines as frets, a thick nut line at position 1, lowest-pitched string leftmost when right-handed, and a position marker in place of the nut above the first fret — standard chord-box practice as taught in Berklee PULSE and used in every published chord dictionary.
• Standard tunings drawn for each instrument: guitar E A D G B E, seven-string B E A D G B E, bass E A D G, five-string bass B E A D G, ukulele G C E A (re-entrant high G), banjo g D G B D (open G), mandolin G D A E in four courses.
• Page geometry: US Letter = 612 × 792 pt and A4 = 595.28 × 841.89 pt, where 1 point = 1/72 inch. Boxes are tiled into the printable area — the sheet minus its margins, minus the header and hole-punch gutter when those are on.
• The layout engine is checked on every build by a fixture test covering string counts and tunings per instrument, the left-handed mirror, the banjo drone's fret-5 start, page dimensions, preset fidelity, box fit and non-overlap at maximum density, chord-name parsing, and share-link round-trips — so the deployed sheet cannot drift from the conventions described here.

Print at 100% / "Actual size" for true spacing. Reviewed by Julian Reyes, MM (Berklee). About Julian · Last reviewed September 20, 2026.

Embed this blank chord chart generator

Free for guitar teachers, music schools, lesson blogs and forum posts. The required attribution is built into the snippet — no fee, no account, no analytics attached to the embed.

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  Blank guitar chord charts by
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  &middot; Reviewed by Julian Reyes, MM (Berklee)
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