Most Chord Apps Show You Shapes No Hand Can Play

Search the App Store for a guitar chord dictionary and you will find apps advertising thousands of voicings per chord. It sounds generous. It is closer to the opposite.

A six-string guitar with fifteen frets offers an enormous number of ways to sound the four notes of a Cmaj7. Enumerate them naively and you get a very large number very quickly. The trouble is that the overwhelming majority are unplayable — they need a six-fret stretch, or a fifth finger, or they ask the ring finger to sit behind the index on an adjacent string.

Advertising the raw count is advertising the size of the haystack. What a guitarist wants is the needle.

The more useful approach is to generate everything and then throw most of it away. Reject any shape spanning more than four frets. Reject anything needing a fifth finger. Reject voice crossings between adjacent strings. Reject semitone clashes, and reject intervals crowded too tightly in the bass, where they turn to mud.

Each of those rules is an opinion, and reasonable guitarists would argue about the thresholds. That is fine. An opinionated filter that returns forty usable shapes is worth more than a neutral one returning four thousand, because the second one has quietly handed the filtering work back to you.

The number worth putting on the box is not how many you generated. It is how few you kept.