It looks like music-theory wallpaper, but it's really a compass: every key's chord family sits right next to it, and the keys that blend smoothly are always neighbors on the wheel. Click around below — it updates for guitar as you go.
Free to use. No sign-up, no account, nothing to install, and it works on a phone. Open it and go make something.
Starting point: you don't need to read the wheel top to bottom. Pick the key you already play in most (probably G, C, D, A, E, or one of their minors), click it, and read the panel on the right.
1
Find your chord family
Every key has exactly seven chords that "belong" to it. Click a key and they're all laid out for you, in the order songs actually use them.
2
Borrow from the neighbors
The two keys touching yours on the wheel share six of seven notes with it. That's why key changes and borrowed chords between neighbors sound natural instead of jarring.
3
Let it pick your capo
Keys far from C, G, D, A, or E mean barre chords — unless you capo up and play the easy shapes instead. The panel suggests one for every key.
selected keyG major1♯ (F#)
selected key neighbors (its IV & V, or ii & III chords) relative major / minor
Progressions
G major
1♯ (F#) · relative minor Em
Chord family
Chords tinted red are diminished — unstable, built for passing through rather than resting on.
Chord shapes on guitar
🎵 Capture a song idea — click chords or notes as you find them, tag the part, export for later
Click chords (or scale notes below) to start building a snippet…
Progressions to try in this key
On guitar
Lead notes to try
Both are five-note (or six, with the blue note) moveable shapes — the pattern of frets between the notes stays the same in every key. Once you know where the root note falls on the low E or A string, the rest of the shape follows. Almost any note from these lists will sound "in" over the whole chord family — mistakes mostly come from lingering on one too long, not from playing it. The note tinted blue is the blue note itself — unrelated to the wheel's teal relative-key marking above, it's just a small pun on the name.
Modes — an optional extra flavor for this key
Why the wheel is shaped like this
Start on C and go up a fifth — five notes up the alphabet, wrapping as needed — and you land on G. Go up a fifth from G and you land on D. Keep stacking fifths and you eventually touch all twelve keys and land back on C, which is why it's a circle instead of a line. Each step clockwise adds exactly one sharp to the key signature; each step counterclockwise adds one flat. That's the whole mechanism — the wheel isn't decoration, it's just every key sorted by how many accidentals it has.
The reason this matters for songwriting: the two chords sitting next to any key on the wheel are that key's IV and V chords — the two chords, besides the root itself, that almost every chord progression leans on. Pick a key, look one wedge either side of it, and you're looking at three-quarters of the "Wonderwall" chord vocabulary before you've thought about theory at all.
Reading a chord family
The seven chords in the panel run I – ii – iii – IV – V – vi – vii°. Capital-numeral chords (I, IV, V) are major; lowercase (ii, iii, vi) are minor; the little circle (vii°) is a diminished chord you'll mostly use in passing, not as a resting point. Almost every folk, pop, rock, and country song is built from I, IV, V, and vi — that's four chords out of the seven, and they're always the biggest, most useful ones in the family.
Clicking the inner ring instead reframes things around the relative minor — same seven notes, same seven chords, but counted from the vi chord instead, so it becomes i. Minor-key songs usually lean on i, iv, v, VI, and VII. One common trick: swap the minor v for a major V (in A minor, that's E instead of Em) right before returning to i — it pulls harder toward home. That's a borrowed note from the harmonic minor scale, and it's why so many minor-key songs use a chord that technically isn't "in the key."
What’s in it
Nine tunings
Standard, Double Drop D, Modal E, Modal D, DADGAD, Open G, Open Gsus4, Open C6, and the Crosby tuning. Every chord and scale diagram redraws for the tuning you pick.
Chord shapes you can trust
Each voicing is brute-force checked to sound only real chord tones with the root in the bass — never a hand-guessed shape. Flip any chord between its E-shape and A-shape.
All seven modes
Ionian through Locrian, built on your key's own tonic and spelled from its own letter, each with a fretboard diagram, note names, and a note on the mood it carries.
Four genre sounds
Plain/Folk, Jazz, Blues, and Punk reshape the whole chord family at once — and the progressions list follows along, so a 12-bar blues reads G7–C7–D7 instead of G–C–D.
Embellishment chips
Swap any chord for add9, maj7, sus2, sus4, m7, m9, dom7, or a power chord, with a caption on the feel it brings. Which chips appear depends on the chord's real role in the key.
Capo positions
For any key, the lowest capo fret that lets you play fully open C, D, E, G, A, Am, Dm, or Em shapes — so you can stay in the shapes your hands already know.
Positions up the neck
Walk any scale or mode through every position it naturally falls into, root-anchored, from the nut to the top of the neck. Your choices are remembered as you change keys.
A place for song ideas
Catch chord and note snippets in a scratchpad while you noodle, then export the lot when something starts to turn into a song.
