Someone asked me to write down some alternative chord shapes for some of the common chords. I started writing this document to give an idea of how to work them out without having to refer to dictionaries/chord books. I also needed to generate the chord diagrams for song sheets as I couldn’t find the half-diminished chords I needed, so I finished it anyway, long after realising it was too detailed to be of interest to most people.
Anyway, you can download this, either to read or to copy and paste the chord diagrams for songsheets.
The notion of repeating chord patterns rising up the neck is one that I believe applies to all fretted instruments so will have been common knowledge going back to ancient times.
The idea behind using the four basic ‘7’ chords to derive all other four note chords isn’t mine but one I first encountered in a book called ‘a guide to advanced chords for the ukulele volume 1’ – published by curtsheller publishing. I’d recommend getting a copy if you find it interesting as he provides diagrams for chords that I haven’t provided.
The chord diagrams were generated using Gnu LilyPond – This is free high quality software, but it has a very steep learning curve which puts many people off. The source code I used as input to LilyPond is in the appendix to the document if you are remotely interested. You can copy this into a text file and, if you read the comments at the top, you can add an entry for your own funky fret-diagram and run LilyPond on it. LilyPond also produces excellent quality staff music notation and tabs and can cope with most requirements for music notation.
Here is a template for members wishing to edit songsheets – template
Happy Ukes 